Top 100 Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes
#1. Ah! what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#2. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#3. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#6. Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#8. Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - He hath awakened from the dream of life
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#9. War, waged from whatever motive, extinguishes the sentiment of reason and justice in the mind.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#10. Had this author [Sir W Drummond Academical Questions, chap. iii.], instead of inveighing against the guilt and absurdity of atheism, demonstrated its falsehood, his conduct would have, been more suited to the modesty of the skeptic and the toleration of the philosopher.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#11. Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#12. 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!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#13. He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#14. every shape and mode of matter lends Its force to the omnipotence of mind, Which from its dark mine drags the gem of truth To decorate its paradise of peace.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#15. Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#16. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#18. Contemporary criticism only represents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with ... Time will reverse the judgement of the vulgar.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#19. When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#20. I am the eye with which the Universe / Beholds itself, and knows it is divine.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#21. When merciless ambition, or mad zeal, has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield, That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves, And call the sad work glory ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#22. When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead - When the cloud is scattered The rainbow's glory is shed ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#23. Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#25. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#26. Sow seed
but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth
let no imposter heap;
Weave robes
let not the idle wear;
Forge arms
in your defence to bear.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#27. We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice; we
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#28. Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#29. How beautiful is sunset when the glow Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#30. War is a kind of superstition, the pageantry of arms and badges corrupts the imagination of men.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#31. Rough wind, the moanest loud Grief too sad for song; Wild wind, when sullen cloud Knells all the night long; Sad storm, whose tears are vain, Bare woods, whose branches strain, Deep caves and dreary main, Wail, for the world's wrong!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#33. We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#35. Till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#36. Thou art Justice ne'er for gold May thy righteous laws be sold As laws are in England thou Shield'st alike the high and low.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#38. What if English toil and blood Was poured forth, even as a flood? It availed, Oh, Liberty, To dim, but not extinguish thee.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#39. My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#40. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#41. The howl of self-interest is loud ... but the heart is black which throbs solely to its note.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#43. The babe is at peace within the womb, the corpse is at rest within the tomb. We begin in what we end.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#44. Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#45. Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#46. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#47. Love withers under constraints. Its very essence is liberty; it is comparable neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries are in confidence, equality and unreserve.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#48. Equality in possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinements of civilization; it is one of the conditions of that system of society towards which, with whatever hope of ultimate success, it is our duty to tend.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#50. A husband and wife ought to continue united so long as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#51. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#52. As belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief; ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#53. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#54. Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind;
The foul cubs like their parents are.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#56. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#57. So is Hope Changed for Despair-one laid upon the shelf, We take the other. Under heaven's high cope Fortune is god-all you endure and do Depends on circumstance as much as you.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#58. Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this dim world
That the pale name of priest might shrink and dwindle
Into the Hell from which it first was furled.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#59. For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not, the beautiful.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#61. Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#62. Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks, A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books, Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures,-disentangle them who may.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#63. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#64. Fame, power, and gold, are loved for their own sakes - are worshipped with a blind, habitual idolatry.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#65. [L]ike thee to those in sorrow, Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow To the rough year just awake In its cradle on the brake. The brightest hour of unborn Spring, Through the winter wandering, Found, it seems, the halcyon Morn To hoar February born.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#66. The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#67. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#68. And priests dare babble of a God of peace,
Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood,
Murdering the while, uprooting every germ
Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all,
Making the earth a slaughter - house!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#69. No more alone through the world's wilderness,
Although I trod the paths of high intent,
I journeyed now: no more companionless
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#70. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#71. 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?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#72. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#73. 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
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#75. Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine, In one spirit meet and mingle-Why not I with thine?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#77. The same means that have supported every other popular belief have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, and falsehood; deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity have made it what it is.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#78. But hope will make thee young, for Hope and Youth
Are children of one mother, even Love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#79. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#81. As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#82. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#83. Our Adonais has drunk poisonoh! What deaf and viperous murderer could crown Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#84. (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?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#85. I'm...
like a poet hidden
In the light of thought
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#86. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#87. Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#89. To hope until hope creates from its very own wreck the thing it contemplates.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#90. You are now
In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.
Yet in its depth what treasures!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#93. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#94. silent those sweet lips, Once breathing eloquence That might have soothed a tiger's rage Or thawed the cold heart of a conqueror.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#95. 'tis He, arrayed In the soft light of his own smiles, which spread Like radiance from the cloud-surrounded moon ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#98. I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#99. Wealth and dominion fade into the mass
Of the great sea of human right and wrong,
When once from our possession they must pass;
But love, though misdirected, is among
The things which are immortal, and surpass
All that frail stuff which will be - or which was.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#100. Joy, joy, joy!
Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,
And the future is dark, and the present is spread,
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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