"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 (The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

"Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

"Soul meets soul on lovers lips."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"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

"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

"Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
— 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

"The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance"
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"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 Mask Of Anarchy: Written On Occasion Of The Massacre At Manchester)

"Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (Prometheus Unbound)

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

"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

"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

"Whatever may be his [man's] true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution (change and extinction). This is the character of all life and being - each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are contained. - "On Life" "
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"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

"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)

"If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is love."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"I Fall upon the thorns of life...."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."
— 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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! '"
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The indignity of your fate is the will of one more powerful."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"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

"The being called God...bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh"
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Mask Of Anarchy: Written On Occasion Of The Massacre At Manchester)

"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

"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

"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

"If winter comes,can spring be far behind?"
— Percy Bysshe Shelley