Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

How many a rustic Milton has passed by Stifling the speechless longings of his heart In unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled His energies no longer tameless then To mould a pin or fabricate a nail!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Fear not for the future weep not for the past.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Man who man would be must rule the empire of himself.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

January grey is here Like a sexton by her grave February bears the bier March with grief doth howl and rave And April weeps - but O ye hours! Follow with May's fairest flowers.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

That orbed maiden with white fire laden Whom mortals call the moon.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hail to thee blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert That from Heaven or near it Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

See! the mountains kiss high heaven And the waves clasp one another No sister flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother And the sunlight clasps the earth And the moonbeams kiss the sea: - What are all these kissings worth If thou kiss not me?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I have drunken deep of joy And I will taste no other wine tonight.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Jealousy's eyes are green.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

If winter comes can spring be far behind?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

History is: Fables agreed upon - Voltaire The biography of a few stout and earnest persons - Ralph Waldo Emerson A vast Mississippi of falsehood - Matthew Arnold A confused heap of facts - Lord Chesterfield A cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man -

Percy Bysshe Shelley

First our pleasures die - and then Our hopes and then our fears - and when These are dead the debt is due Dust claims dust - and we die too.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a Being beyond its limits capable of creating it.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:Power, like a desolating pestilence,Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,A mechanised automaton.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

We look before and after, And pine for what is not:Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.Yet if we could scornHate, and pride, and fear;If we were things bornNot to shed a tear,I know not how thy joy we everShould come near.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Before we aspire after theoretical perfection in the amelioration of our political state, it is necessary that we possess those advantages which we have been cheated of, and which the experience of modern times has proved that nations even under the present conditions are susceptible.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Equality in possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinements of civilization; it is one of the conditions of that system of society towards which, with whatever hope of ultimate success, it is our duty to tend.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sorrow (A Song)To me this world's a dreary blank,All hopes in life are gone and fled,My high strung energies are sank,And all my blissful hopes lie dead.--The world once smiling to my view, Showed scenes of endless bliss and joy;The world I then but little knew,Ah! little knew how pleasures cloy;All then was jocund, all was gay,No thought beyond the present hour,I danced in pleasure’s fading ray,Fading alas! as drooping flower.Nor do the heedless in the throng,One thought beyond the morrow give,They court the feast, the dance, the song, Nor think how short their time to live.The heart that bears deep sorrow’s trace,What earthly comfort can console,It drags a dull and lengthened pace,'Till friendly death its woes enroll.--The sunken cheek, the humid eyes,E’en better than the tongue can tell;In whose sad breast deep sorrow lies,Where memory's rankling traces dwell.--The rising tear, the stifled sigh, A mind but ill at ease display,Like blackening clouds in stormy sky,Where fiercely vivid lightnings play.Thus when souls' energy is dead,When sorrow dims each earthly view, When every fairy hope is fled,We bid ungrateful world adieu.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Confound the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

See the mountains kiss high HeavenAnd the waves clasp one another;No sister-flower would be forgivenIf it disdained its brother;And the sunlight clasps the earth,And the moonbeams kiss the sea -What is all this sweet work worthIf thou kiss not me?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I can give not what men call love;But wilt thou accept notThe worship the heart lifts aboveAnd the heavens reject not:The desire of the moth for the star,Of the night for the morrow,The devotion to something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Alas! this is not what I thought life was.I knew that there were crimes and evil men,Misery and hate; nor did I hope to passUntouched by suffering, through the rugged glen.In mine own heart I saw as in a glassThe hearts of others ... And whenI went among my kind, with triple brassOf calm endurance my weak breast I armed,To bear scorn, fear, and hate, a woeful mass!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

There was a Being whom my spirit oftMet on its visioned wanderings far aloft.A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman....

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

IF [GOD] HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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

A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast;Custards for supper, and an endless hostOf syllabubs and jellies and mincepies,And other such ladylike luxuries.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Joy, joy, joy!Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,And the future is dark, and the present is spread,Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

And in a mad tranceStrike with our spirit's knifeInvulnerable nothingsWe decayLike corpses in a charnelFear & GriefConvulse is & consume usDay by dayAnd cold hopes swarmLike worms withinOur living clay

Percy Bysshe Shelley

All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

War is a kind of superstition, the pageantry of arms and badges corrupts the imagination of men.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sonnet: Political GreatnessNor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame;Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,History is but the shadow of their shame,Art veils her glass, or from the pageant startsAs to oblivion their blind millions fleet,Staining that Heaven with obscene imageryOf their own likeness. What are numbers knitBy force or custom? Man who man would be,Must rule the empire of himself; in itMust be supreme, establishing his throneOn vanquished will, quelling the anarchyOf hopes and fears, being himself alone.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

Percy Bysshe Shelley

And I have fitted up some chambers thereLooking towards the golden Eastern air,And level with the living winds, which flowLike waves above the living waves below.—I have sent books and music there, and allThose instruments with which high spirits callThe future from its cradle, and the pastOut of its grave, and make the present lastIn thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,Folded within their own eternity.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

We look before and after,And pine for what is not;Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

...Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs— To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another’s mind. While the touch of Nature’s art Harmonizes heart to heart. I leave this notice on my door For each accustomed visitor:— “I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields;...Awake! arise! And come away! To the wild woods and the plains, And the pools where winter rains Image all their roof of leaves, Where the pine its garland weaves Of sapless green, and ivy dun Round stems that never kiss the sun: Where the lawns and pastures be, And the sandhills of the sea:— Where the melting hoar-frost wets The daisy-star that never sets, And wind-flowers, and violets, Which yet join not scent to hue, Crown the pale year weak and new; When the night is left behind In the deep east, dun and blind, And the blue noon is over us, And the multitudinous Billows murmur at our feet, Where the earth and ocean meet, And all things seem only one In the universal sun.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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