Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotations

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

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.

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

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

Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.

When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.

Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.

There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

There is no real wealth but the labor of man.

The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.

Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.

Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.

Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.

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

Monarchy is only the string that ties the robber's bundle.

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life... is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.

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

Here I swear, and as I break my oath may eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge. Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon; to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again / I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.

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

Kings are like stars, - they rise and set, they have - The worship of the world, but no repose

Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, -- but it returneth.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep -- he hath awakened from the dream of life -- 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

Who killed Johnny Keats? "I," said the Quarterly, "So savage and tartarly, 'Twas one of my feats

Winter is come and gone,But grief returns with the revolving year.

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 host Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies, And other such ladylike luxuries

There is no sport in hate when all the rage is on one side

What 'twas weak to do 'Tis weaker to lament, once being done

Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors.

The sunlight claps the earth And the moonbeams kiss the sea: What are all these kissings worth If thou kiss not me?

A sensitive plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light, and closed them beneath the kisses of night.

As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker, so an unsuccessful author turns critic

A wild dissolving bliss Over my frame he breathed, approaching near, And bent his eyes of kindling tenderness Near mine, and on my lips impressed a lingering kiss,

The unquiet republic of the maze of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness

There was no corn -- in the wide market-place all loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold; They weighed it in small scales -- and many a face was fixed in eager horror then; his gold the miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain.

All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

It might make one in love with death, to be buried in so sweet a place.

They learn in suffering what they teach in song

Heaven's ebon vault, studded with stars unutterably bright, through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, seems like a canopy which love has spread to curtain her sleeping world

All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire is most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still.

The gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.

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.

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 is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me?

As long as skies are blue, and fields are green Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow

The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?

Poetry Love's Philosophy The fountains mingle with the river And the rivers with the ocean, The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle— Why not I with thine? See the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdain'd 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?

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.

God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.

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.

Poet's food is love and fame.

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.

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.

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

For love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change.

Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights The fairest feelings of the opening heart, Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love, And judgment cease to wage unnatural war With passion's unsubduable array.

What if English toil and blood Was poured forth, even as a flood? It availed, Oh, Liberty, To dim, but not extinguish thee.

The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning.

I Fall upon the thorns of life....

Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro’ the spirit’s gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

Know what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of Baptism; it is to believe in belief; it is to be so little that elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child had its fairy godmother in its soul.

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery.

There is a harmony In autumn, and a luster in its sky...

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet

A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.

I stood within the city disinterred; And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls Of spirits passng through the streets; and heard the Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless halls; The oracular thunder penetrating shook The listening soul in my suspended blood.

The psychological and moral comfort of a presence at once humble and understanding-this is the greatest benefit that the dog has bestowed upon man.