Top 100 Percy Shelley Quotes
#1. Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus' Idylls to John Milton's 'Lycidas' and Percy Shelley's 'Adonais.'
Susan Stewart
#2. Underneath Day's azure eyes, Ocean's nursling, Venice lies, A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite's destined halls
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#3. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#4. The person who has been accustomed to subdue men by force will be less inclined to the trouble of convincing or persuading them.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#5. Ah! what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#6. There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft.
A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#7. 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
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#8. O weep for Adonis - He is dead."
"Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep - he hath wakened from the dream of life
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#10. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#11. You must come home with and be my guest; You will give joy to me, and I will do all that is in my power to honor you.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#13. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#14. Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow claspest the limits of mortality.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#15. It is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill. We might be otherwise, we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek, But in our mind? and if we were not weak, Should we be less in deed than in desire?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#16. Fate,Time,Occasion,Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#17. Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#18. Virtue owns a more eternal foe Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime, And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#20. Not the swart Pariah in some Indian grove, Lone, lean, and hunted by his brother's hate, Hath drunk so deep the cup of bitter fate As that poor wretch who cannot, cannot love: He bears a load which nothing can remove, A killing, withering weight.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#21. 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
#22. He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,
Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#23. Let there be light! Said Liberty , And like sunrise from the sea, Athens arose!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#24. Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave, Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joyand fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, Swift be thy flight!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#28. For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man's face. I now Say what I think.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#30. Lord Byron doesn't have a life plan. He doesn't have a day plan. I once found a note that he wrote to himself that said: 'put on pants.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#32. It is true that the reluctance to abstain from animal food, in those who have been long accustomed to its stimulus, is so great in some persons of weak minds, as to be scarcely overcome; but this is far from bringing any argument in its favour
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#34. God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#36. 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
#38. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#39. A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#40. War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#42. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#45. Before we aspire after theoretical perfection in the amelioration of our political state, it is necessary that we possess those advantages which we have been cheated of, and which the experience of modern times has proved that nations even under the present conditions are susceptible.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#46. 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 ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#47. Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - He hath awakened from the dream of life
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#48. Peace is in the grave. The grave hides all things beautiful and good. I am a God and cannot find it there, Nor would I seek it; for, though dread revenge, This is defeat, fierce king, not victory.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#49. War, waged from whatever motive, extinguishes the sentiment of reason and justice in the mind.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#51. Lie bills and calculations much perplexed, With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint Traced over them in blue and yellow paint.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#54. What do you think? Young women of rank eat - you will never guess what - garlick!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#55. Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#56. What is Love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#58. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#59. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#60. Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#61. The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#62. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#65. By all that is sacred in our hope for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth to give a fair trial to the vegetable system!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#66. 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
#67. Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#68. True Love in this differs from gold and clay,/That to divide is not to take away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#69. Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#70. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#71. 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
#72. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#73. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#74. 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
#75. Where art thou, beloved To-morrow?
When young and old, and strong and weak,
Rich and poor, through joy and sorrow,
Thy sweet smiles we ever seek,
In thy place
ah! well-a-day!
We find the thing we fled
To-day!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#77. 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
#79. Love's very pain is sweet,
But its reward is in the world divine
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#80. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#83. [Poetry] strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bear the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#84. Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal. Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#85. Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#86. The conceptions which any nation or individual entertains of the God of its popular worship may be inferred from their own actions and opinions, which are the subjects of their approbation among their fellow-men.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#87. Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river Sparkling, bursting, borne away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#91. Like a glowworm golden, in a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden its aerial blue Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#94. Man would have been too happy, if, limiting himself to the visible objects which interested him, he had employed, to perfect his real sciences, his laws, his morals, his education, one-half the efforts he has put into his researches on the Divinity.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#95. God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#96. 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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#97. Science, Poetry, and Thought Are thy lamps; they make the lot Of the dwellers in a cot So serene, they curse it not.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#98. Contemporary criticism only represents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with ... Time will reverse the judgement of the vulgar.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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