Percy Bysshe Shelley > Quotes

“Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“Soul meets soul on lovers lips.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
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.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

“A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

“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.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy: Written on Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester

“Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Know what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of Baptism; it is to believe in belief; it is to be so little that elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child had its fairy godmother in its soul.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

“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.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

“Joy, once lost, is pain”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

“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.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory,
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro’ the spirit’s gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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

“Poetry

Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle—
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Poetry and Prose

“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

“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

“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

“I Fall upon the thorns of life....”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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 it's own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, not 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”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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, Adonais

“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

“Fear not for the future, weep not for the past”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“For love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Familiar acts are beautiful through love.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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, The Necessity of Atheism, and Other Essays

“The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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!”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“Poet's food is love and fame.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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

“We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever;

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. -- A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. -- One wandering 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.

”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“All love is sweet, given or received...”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may last!”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“There is eloquence in the tongueless
wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the
reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something
within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless
rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like
the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved
singing to you alone.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“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, Shelley's Poetry and Prose

“(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