Faith & Spirit Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley’s jab lands like a piece of anti-clerical lightning: Religion and Selfishness aren’t merely acquainted, they’re “twin-sisters,” born of the same household and raised to protect each other. The phrase is engineered to offend the pious precisely because it denies religion its favorite self-image - charity, humility, moral elevation - and instead casts it as a biological relative of greed. “Twin” tightens the indictment: not cause-and-effect, not corruption-by-association, but an intimate equivalence, two faces of one impulse.

The intent is political as much as spiritual. Shelley wrote in a Britain where established religion wasn’t just theology; it was an institution braided into class power, law, and social discipline. To call religion selfish is to accuse it of serving property, hierarchy, and respectability while preaching submission to those with less. The subtext is that piety can be a moral alibi: a way to sanctify desire (for control, status, security) without admitting it as desire. Religion becomes a technology for laundering self-interest into virtue.

Stylistically, the line works because it’s brutally compressed. Shelley doesn’t argue; he names. By choosing kinship language, he turns an abstract critique into a scandal of family resemblance: once you see the sibling relationship, you start spotting shared gestures - the hunger for certainty, the comfort of being “right,” the quiet pleasure of judging others. It’s Romantic-era dissent sharpened into a slogan, designed to travel, provoke, and recruit.