Date: 1820

"O, 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 hurled, / A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure; / Till human thoughts might kneel alone, / ...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven, / Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene, / As light in the sun, throned."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"Yet am I king over myself, and rule / The torturing and conflicting throngs within, / As Jove rules you when Hell grows mutinous."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)