Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.

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

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet

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

No more let life divide what death can join together.

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

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

Until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust.

Where is perfection? Where I cannot reach.

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.

It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.

I know the cause of all human disappointment -- worldly prejudice.

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

Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!

O weep for Adonis - He is dead." "Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep - he hath wakened from the dream of life

Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may last!

Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.

Jealousy's eyes are green.

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

Strange thoughts beget strange deeds.

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

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

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

Deep truth is imageless.

The howl of self-interest is loud ... but the heart is black which throbs solely to its note.

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

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

The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning.

Be your strong and simple words Keen to wound as sharpened swords, And wide as targes let them be, With their shade to cover ye.

Just a tender sense of my own process, that holds something of my connection with the divine.

Love! dearest, sweetest power! how much are we indebted to thee! How much superior are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources!

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

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

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

I am not much of a hand at love songs, you see I mingle metaphysics with even this, but perhaps in this age of Philosophy that may be excused.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

Think ye by gazing on each other's eyes To multiply your lovely selves?

Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep — that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.

All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil

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

O! I burn with impatience for the moment of the dissolution of intolerance; it has injured me.

The Galilean is not a favorite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favor, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership.

So soon as this want or power [of love] is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.

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.

Whence are we, and why are we? Of what scene The actors or spectators?

Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay you low?

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.

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.

Death will come when thou art dead, soon, too soon.

Necessity, thou mother of the world!