Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes
The same means that have supported every other popular belief have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, and falsehood; deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity have made it what it is.
No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible.
Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; the subject, not the citizen... The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
It is vain philosophy that supposes more causes than are exactly adequate to explain the phenomena of things.
The discussion of any subject is a right that you have brought into the world with your heart and tongue. Resign your heart's blood before you part with this inestimable privilege of man.
Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle Such lamps within the dome of this dim world That the pale name of priest might shrink and dwindle Into the Hell from which it first was furled.
Our Adonais has drunk poisonoh! What deaf and viperous murderer could crown Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
Image of rugged cliffs And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.
A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew, have equal rights: they are men and brethren.
Everytime we say that god is the author of some phenomenon, that signifies that we are ignorant of how such a phenomenon was caused by the forces of nature.
In proportion as a man is selfish, so far has he receded from the motive which constitutes virtue.
Lie bills and calculations much perplexed, With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint Traced over them in blue and yellow paint.
The babe is at peace within the womb, the corpse is at rest within the tomb. We begin in what we end.
God is a hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof; the onus probandi rests on the theist.
... Virtue owns a more eternal foe Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime, And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.
When merciless ambition, or mad zeal, has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield, That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves, And call the sad work glory.
Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.
The moon of Mahomet Arose, and it shall set; While, blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon, The cross leads generations on.
The flood of time is rolling on; We stand upon its brink, whilst they are gone To glide in peace down death's mysterious stream. Have ye done well?
Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the heights of love's rare universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire-- I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow
The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
I love Love - though he has wings, And like light can flee, But above all other things, Spirit, I love thee - Thou art love and life! Oh come, Make once more my heart thy home.
And bid them love each other and be blest: And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, And come and be my guest, - for I am Love's.
I am convinced that there can be no regeneration of mankind until laughter is put down.
Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being.
Whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful.
He wanders, like a day-appearing dream, Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.
God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.
Jesus Christ opposed with earnest eloquence the panic fears and hateful superstitions which have enslaved mankind for ages.
Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.