Reading does not occupy me enough: the only relief I find springs from the composition of poetry, which necessitates contemplations that lift me above the stormy mist of sensations which are my habitual place of abode. I have lately been composing a poem on Keats; it is better than anything I have yet written and worthy both of him and of me.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

There ’s not one atom of yon earth But once was living man; Nor the minutest drop of rain, That hangeth in its thinnest cloud, But flowed in human veins;.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

I think one is always in love with something or other; the error – and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it – consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Swift stars with flashing tresses.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

If there are no reasons to suppose that we have existed before that period at which our existence apparently commences, then there are no grounds for supposing that we shall continue to exist after our existence has apparently ceased.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, looking emotions once they feared to feel, and changed to all which once they dared not be, yet being now, made earth like heaven.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven, which shook, but fell not.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Yet if thou wilt, as ’tis destiny of trodden worms to writhe till they are dead, put forth thy might.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

And death shall be the last embrace of her who takes the life she gave, even as a mother folding her child, says, ‘Leave me not again.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Among the haunts of humankind, hard-featured men, or with proud, angry looks, or cold, staid gait, or false and hollow smiles, or the dull sneer of self-loved ignorance, or other such foul masks, with which ill thoughts hide that fair being whom we spirits call man.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hate, disdain, or fear, self-love or self-contempt, on human brows no more inscribed, as o’er the gate of hell, ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

His lips in truth-entangling lines which smiled he lie his tongue disdained to speak.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the streaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say ‘Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Man resembles no carnivorous animal.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a natural system of diet, old age would be our last and our only malady.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a natural system of diet, old age would be our last and our only malady: the term of our existence would be protracted; we should enjoy life, and no longer preclude others from the enjoyment of it; all sensational delights would be infinitely more exquisite and perfect; the very sense of being would then be a continued pleasure, such as we now feel it in some few and favoured moments of our youth.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Every man forms, as it were, his god from his own character; to the divinity of one of simple habits, no offering would be more acceptable than the happiness of his creatures. He would be incapable of hating or persecuting others for the love of God.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

He will find, moreover, a system of simple diet to be a system of perfect epicurism.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit; unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley
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