Top 439 Quotes & Sayings by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Last updated on November 23, 2024.
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
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.
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
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.
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.
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
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.
The soul's joy lies in doing.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
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.
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.
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
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.
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.
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.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
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.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
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.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.
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 great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
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.
O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.
All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.
Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.
When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven.
Man who man would be, must rule the empire of himself.
Sometimes The Devil is a gentleman.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Blessed are those who have preserved internal sanctity of soul; who are conscious of no secret deceit; who are the same in act as they are in desire; who conceal no thought, no tendencies of thought, from their own conscience; who are faithful and sincere witnesses, before the tribunal of their own judgments, of all that passes within their mind. Such as these shall see God.
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.
Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.
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!
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
when the winds are breathing low,
and the stars are shining bright.
Sometimes it's better to put love into hugs than to put it into words. Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought
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.
Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number- Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you Ye are many-they are few.
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