Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays Quotes

“In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

“If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

“A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

“Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

“God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

“Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

“You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circle less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

“At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God’s own heart?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

“Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

“Man would have been too happy, if, limiting himself to the visible objects which interested him, he had employed, to perfect his real sciences, his laws, his morals, his education, one-half the efforts he has put into his researches on the Divinity.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays