Percy Bysshe Shelley

Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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!
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Here I swear, and as I break my oath may eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge. Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon; to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again -- I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom; And all good things are thus confused with ill.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal. Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.
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

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

There was no corn -- in the wide market-place all loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold; They weighed it in small scales -- and many a face was fixed in eager horror then; his gold the miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The soul's joy lies in doing.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep -- he hath awakened from the dream of life -- 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.
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

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

All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire is most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

... a wild dissolving bliss Over my frame he breathed, approaching near, And bent his eyes of kindling tenderness Near mine, and on my lips impressed a lingering kiss,
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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