Top 439 Quotes & Sayings by Percy Bysshe Shelley - Page 2

To hearts which near each other move From evening close to morning light,The night is good; because, my love,They never say good-night.

Are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar?

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

I love tranquil solitude.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.

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

Joy, once lost, is pain

Within my heart is the lamp of love, And that is day!

I love tranquil solitude And such society As is quiet, wise, and good.

Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.

There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

Strange thoughts beget strange deeds.

When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.

Fame, power, and gold, are loved for their own sakes - are worshipped with a blind, habitual idolatry.

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty.

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!

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.

I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won

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?

Love's very pain is sweet, But its reward is in the world divine Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.

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.

I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

In fact, truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.

Love's very pain is sweet

Words are but holy as the deeds they cover.

I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.

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

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.

All love is sweet Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever.

I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers.

Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.

Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine, In one spirit meet and mingle-Why not I with thine?

When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead - When the cloud is scattered The rainbow's glory is shed.

Fate,Time,Occasion,Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal love.

I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

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.

If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, what doubts should we have 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?

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. 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 pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet, and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.

If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless

Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are.

You ought to love all mankind; nay, every individual of mankind. You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circles 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.

Hell is a city much like London A populous and smoky city

I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under; And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend ? perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.

It is only by hearsay (by word of mouth passed down from generation to generation) that whole peoples adore the God of their fathers and of their priests: authority, confidence, submission and custom with them take the place of conviction or of proofs: they prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers taught them to prostrate themselves and pray: but why did their fathers fall on their knees?

A dream has power to poison sleep.

The young moon has fed Her exhausted horn With the sunset's fire.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

The jealous keys of truth's eternal doors.

True Love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away. Love is like understanding, that grows bright, Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light, Imagination! which from earth and sky, And from the depths of human phantasy, As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow Of its reverberated lightning.

Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.

Christianity indeed has equaled Judaism in the atrocities, and exceeded it in the extent of its desolation. Eleven millions of men, women, and children have been killed in battle, butchered in their sleep, burned to death at public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured, assassinated, and pillaged in the spirit of the Religion of Peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God.

We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep. We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free. Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability!

Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth.

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