Percy bysshe shelley quotes

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

The great community of mankind had been subdivided into ten thousand communities, each organized for the ruin of the other.

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.

Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.

A sensitive plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan like leaves to the light, and closed them beneath the kisses of night.

I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.

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

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.

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Sometimes The Devil is a gentleman.

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

The jealous keys of truth's eternal doors.

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!

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.

I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, when the winds are breathing low, and the stars are shining bright.

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

I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won

Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number- Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you Ye are many-they are few.

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

I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

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

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

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.

A dream has power to poison sleep.

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

If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, what doubts should we have concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?

Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, - but it returneth!

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

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.

In proportion to the love existing among men, so will be the community of property and power. Among true and real friends, all is common; and, were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friends. The only perfect and genuine republic is that which comprehends every living being. Those distinctions which have been artificially set up, of nations, societies, families, and religions, are only general names, expressing the abhorrence and contempt with which men blindly consider their fellowmen.

Deep truth is imageless.

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs, - To the silent wilderness, Where the soul need not repress Its music.

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

Christianity indeed has equaled Judaism in the atrocities, and exceeded it in the extent of its desolation. Eleven millions of men, women, and children have been killed in battle, butchered in their sleep, burned to death at public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured, assassinated, and pillaged in the spirit of the Religion of Peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God.

The young moon has fed Her exhausted horn With the sunset's fire.

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.

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.

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

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

I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil

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; 'tis like thy light, Imagination! which from earth and sky, And from the depths of human phantasy, As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow Of its reverberated lightning.

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

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.

Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine, In one spirit meet and mingle-Why not I with thine?

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.

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

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

Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?

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

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.

Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

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?

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.

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Blessed are those who have preserved internal sanctity of soul; who are conscious of no secret deceit; who are the same in act as they are in desire; who conceal no thought, no tendencies of thought, from their own conscience; who are faithful and sincere witnesses, before the tribunal of their own judgments, of all that passes within their mind. Such as these shall see God.

It is not a merit to tolerate, but rather a crime to be intolerant.

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.

Within my heart is the lamp of love, And that is day!

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

The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep. We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free. Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

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

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.

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.

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.

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.

Joy, once lost, is pain

Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.

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.

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.

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.

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

All love is sweet Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever.

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

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

This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty.

It is only by hearsay (by word of mouth passed down from generation to generation) that whole peoples adore the God of their fathers and of their priests: authority, confidence, submission and custom with them take the place of conviction or of proofs: they prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers taught them to prostrate themselves and pray: but why did their fathers fall on their knees?

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

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

First our pleasures die - and then our hopes, and then our fears - and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust - and we die too.

If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless

Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

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

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

Words are but holy as the deeds they cover.

I love tranquil solitude.

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.

Love's very pain is sweet

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

Strange thoughts beget strange deeds.

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.

There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!

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

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. . . .

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

And Spring arose on the garden fair, Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere; And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

Are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar?

I love tranquil solitude And such society As is quiet, wise, and good.

When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead - When the cloud is scattered The rainbow's glory is shed.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought

Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.

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

Love's very pain is sweet, But its reward is in the world divine Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.

Persevere even though Hell and destruction should yawn beneath your feet.

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

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet, and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.

I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields; Reflection, you may come to-morrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow. You with the unpaid bill, Despair, You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care, I will pay you in the grave, Death will listen to your stave.

Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.

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