Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

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.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

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.

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

Sometimes it's better to put love into hugs than to put it into words. Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

[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.

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

A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.

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?

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

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.

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

A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew, have equal rights: they are men and brethren.

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.

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

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

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.

Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.

I have drunken deep of joy.

In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.

I was an infant when my mother went To see an atheist burned. She took me there. The dark-robed priests were met around the pile; The multitude was gazing silently; And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien, Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye, Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth; The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs; His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon; His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate mob Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept. Weep not, child! cried my mother, for that man Has said, 'There is no God.'

The thoughts which the word "God" suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves.

Peace is in the grave.

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

Whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful.

Ah! what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith.

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

A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.

What! alive, and so bold, O earth?

Sometimes The Devil is a gentleman.

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.

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

Sounds of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain awaken'd flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass

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.

That sweet sleep which medicines all pain.

When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven.

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

A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts.

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.

Peter was dull; he was at first Dull; - Oh, so dull - so very dull! Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed - Still with his dulness was he cursed - Dull -beyond all conception - dull.

Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being.

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.

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.

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.

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

Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind.

It is vain philosophy that supposes more causes than are exactly adequate to explain the phenomena of things.

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.