Percy Bysshe Shelley quotes:

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.

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.

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

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

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.

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

Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.

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.

Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.

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

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

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

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

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.

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

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

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

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:Power, like a desolating pestilence,Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,A mechanised automaton.

Nothing in the world is singleAll things by law divineIn one another's being mingleWhy not I with thine?

Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.

War is a kind of superstition, the pageantry of arms and badges corrupts the imagination of men.

War, waged from whatever motive, extinguishes the sentiment of reason and justice in the mind.

It is better that we gain what we demand by a process of negotiation which would occupy twenty years, than that by communicating a sudden shock to the interests of those who are the depositaries and dependents of power we should incur the calamity which their revenge might inflict upon us by giving the signal of war.

It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet

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."

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."

It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet"

There is eloquence in the tonguelesswind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of thereeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to somethingwithin the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathlessrapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, likethe enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one belovedsinging to you alone."

All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.

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

Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden, That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

I love Love - though he has wings, And like light can flee, But above all other things, Spirit, I love thee - Thou art love and life! Oh come, Make once more my heart thy home.

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

Let there be light! Said Liberty , And like sunrise from the sea, Athens arose!

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being. Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.

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

It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower -- and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.

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.

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.

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

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.

It is impossible that had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons.

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.

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.

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.

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.

Those who inflict must suffer, for they see The work of their own hearts, and this must be Our chastisement or recompense.

A husband and wife ought to continue united so long as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.

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.

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.

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

He has outsoared the shadow of our night; envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again; from the contagion of the world's slow stain, he is secure.

... as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief; ...

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. . . .

Spirit, Patience, Gentleness, All that can adorn and bless Art thou let deeds, not words, express Thine exceeding loveliness.

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

Like a glowworm golden, in a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden its aerial blue Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view.

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.

Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks, A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books, Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures,-disentangle them who may.

One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it.

O cease! must hate and death return, Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last!

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

You are now In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. Yet in its depth what treasures!

Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore, Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable sea?

The splendors of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; Like stars to their appointed height they climb And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil.

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

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

The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet.

Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, -- a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field...

The pale stars are gone! For the sun, their swift shepherd, To their folds them compelling, In the depths of the dawn, Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and the flee Beyond his blue dwelling, As fawns flee the leopard.

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.

To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.

What do you think? Young women of rank eat - you will never guess what - garlick!

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.

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.

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

Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave, Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joyand fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, Swift be thy flight!

Rough wind, the moanest loud Grief too sad for song; Wild wind, when sullen cloud Knells all the night long; Sad storm, whose tears are vain, Bare woods, whose branches strain, Deep caves and dreary main, Wail, for the world's wrong!

The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume.

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

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?

Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

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.

And many an ante-natal tomb Where butterflies dream of the life to come.

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.

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

One nightingale in an interfluous wood Satiate the hungry dark with melody.

And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest, Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast, Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air, The soul of her beauty and love lay bare.

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

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.

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.

Age cannot Love destroy, But perfidy can blast the flower, Even when in most unwary hour It blooms in Fancy's bower. Age cannot Love destroy, But perfidy can rend the shrine In which its vermeil splendours shine.

Lie bills and calculations much perplexed, With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint Traced over them in blue and yellow paint.

Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.

Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches.

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.

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

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

The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.

The moon of Mahomet Arose, and it shall set; While, blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon, The cross leads generations on

When my cats arent happy, Im not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even

There was a Being whom my spirit oftMet on its visioned wanderings far aloft.A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman....

And in a mad tranceStrike with our spirit's knifeInvulnerable nothingsWe decayLike corpses in a charnelFear & GriefConvulse is & consume usDay by dayAnd cold hopes swarmLike worms withinOur living clay

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

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

True Love in this differs from gold and clay,/That to divide is not to take away.

I can give not what men call love;But wilt thou accept notThe worship the heart lifts aboveAnd the heavens reject not:The desire of the moth for the star,Of the night for the morrow,The devotion to something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow?

Soul meets soul on lovers lips.

Love withers under constraints. Its very essence is liberty; it is comparable neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries are in confidence, equality and unreserve.