“The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature…” — Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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.”

Defining moral feeling as imaginative sympathy with others and with beauty · A Defence of Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley

About Percy Bysshe Shelley

4 August 1792–8 July 1822

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, the Shelley family home near Horsham in Sussex, and died on 8 July 1822, drowned in the Gulf of Spezia off the Italian coast before he had reached his thirtieth birthday. The extraordinary compression of his life has encouraged a legend of Shelley as the…

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