Poet

Lovers may be - and indeed generally are - enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.

The beginning of atonement is the sense of its necessity.

He who is only just is cruel. Who on earth could live were all judged justly?

There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.

What a strange thing man is; and what a stranger thing woman.

'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.

I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.

Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away; A single laugh demolished the right arm Of his country.

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.

If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.

Wives in their husbands' absences grow subtler, And daughters sometimes run off with the butler.

They never fail who die in a great cause.

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover but will sooner or later find a tyrant.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come.

He who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below.

Shelley is truth itself and honour itself notwithstanding his out-of-the-way notions about religion.