Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

And Spring arose on the garden fair, Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere; And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

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

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

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.

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

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

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

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?

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.

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

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

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.

To hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

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

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.

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.

If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.

The soul's joy lies in doing.

All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil

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

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.

Nought may endure but Mutability.

It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower — and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.

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.

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.

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.

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

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.

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!

It is not a merit to tolerate, but rather a crime to be intolerant.

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

The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.

January gray 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.

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

Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.