Top 439 Quotes & Sayings by Percy Bysshe Shelley - Page 3

O heart, and mind, and thoughts! what thing do you Hope to inherit in the grave below?

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.

I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear.

There is no real wealth but the labour of man. Were the mountains of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race.

O'er Egypt's land of memory floods are level, And they are thine, O Nile! and well thou knowest The soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil, And fruits, and poisons spring where'er thou flowest.

Be your strong and simple words Keen to wound as sharpened swords, And wide as targes let them be, With their shade to cover ye.

The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.

I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.

All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.

Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.

No more let life divide what death can join together.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.

Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone. But grief returns with the revolving year.

Deep truth is imageless.

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.

The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet.

Yes, marriage is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequited fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being. Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.

Sing again, with your dear voice revealing. A tone Of some world far from ours, where music and moonlight and feeling are one.

One nightingale in an interfluous wood Satiate the hungry dark with melody.

A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift.

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.

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe.

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

Just a tender sense of my own process, that holds something of my connection with the divine.

(Title: To the Moon) Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth,-- And ever-changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?

There is no real wealth but the labour of man.

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.

Spirit, Patience, Gentleness, All that can adorn and bless Art thou let deeds, not words, express Thine exceeding loveliness.

The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning.

Love! dearest, sweetest power! how much are we indebted to thee! How much superior are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources!

In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.

For there are deeds which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

Jesus Christ represented God as the principle of all good, the source of all happiness, the wise and benevolent Creator and Preserver of all living things. But the interpreters of his doctrines have confounded the good and the evil principle.

The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the Year On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying. . . .

It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen

The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume.

...Ere midnight’s frown and morning’s smile, ere thou and peace may meet.

Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams.

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.

The howl of self-interest is loud ... but the heart is black which throbs solely to its note.

Far clouds of feathery gold, Shaded with deepest purple, gleam Like islands on a dark blue sea.

Nought may endure but Mutability.

The crime of inquiry is one which religion never has forgiven.

The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.

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?

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

Through the sunset of hope, Like the shapes of a dream, What paradise islands of glory gleam!

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.

I cannot endure the horror, the evil, which comes to self in solitude.

What is Love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves.

Until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust.

One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdain'd For thee to disdain it. One hope too like dispair For prudence to smother, I can give not what men call love: But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And heaven rejects not: The desire of the moth for the star, The devotion of something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?

No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time.

It is among men of genius and science that atheism alone is found.

I am not much of a hand at love songs, you see I mingle metaphysics with even this, but perhaps in this age of Philosophy that may be excused.