Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

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.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

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.

Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.

Man who man would be, must rule the empire of himself.

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.

The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame Over his living head like heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow.

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

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

Underneath Day's azure eyes, Ocean's nursling, Venice lies, A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite's destined halls

To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.

Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!

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 awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats, tho' unseen, amongst us.

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.

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.

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.

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

All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil

Narrow The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, The life that wears, the spirit that creates One object, and one form, and builds thereby A sepulchre for its eternity.

Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.

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.

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.

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.

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.

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.

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

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.

Everytime we say that god is the author of some phenomenon, that signifies that we are ignorant of how such a phenomenon was caused by the forces of nature.

If all the thought which had been expended on the construction of engines of agony and death - the modes of aggression and defence, the raising of armies, and the acquirement of those arts of tyranny and falsehood without which mixed multitudes could neither be led nor governed - had been employed to promote the true welfare and extend the real empire of man, how different would have been the present situation of human society!

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

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - he hath awakened from the dream of life - 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.

Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.

I arise from dreams of thee, And a spirit in my feet Has led me- who knows how? To thy chamber-window, Sweet!

Men must reap the things they sow, Force from force must ever flow.

Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow claspest the limits of mortality.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

We live and move and think; but we are not the creators of our own origin and existence. We are not the arbiters of every motion of our own complicated nature; we are not the masters of our own imaginations and moods of mental being.

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?

Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.

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.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet

The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?

When you can discover where the fresh colors of the faded flower abide, or the music of the broken lyre, seek life among the dead. Such are the anxious and fearful contemplations of the common observer, though the popular religion often prevents him from confessing them even to himself.

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

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

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.