Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes (315 Quotes)

Whether my life had been before that sleep
The Heaven which I imagine, or a Hell
Like this harsh world in which I wake to weep,
I know not.

Mine eyes are sick of this perpetual flow
Of people, & my heart of one sad thought.

But there is stillness now--
Gloom, and the trance of Nature now.

Startled by his own thoughts, he looked around.

As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapor broods
Over the snow.

And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardors of rest and of love,

What alive, and so bold, O earth.

With hue like that when some great painter dips His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

At last, I told them what is death.

Of George III An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king.

I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death?

The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

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

Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

No change, no pause, no hope!

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!

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!

And all the Dreams that watch'd Urania's eyes,
And all the Echoes whom their sister's song
Had held in holy silence, cried: "Arise!

Kings are like stars,they rise and set, they have The worship of the world, but no repose.

And his own thoughts, along that rugged way Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.

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

There is regret, almost remorse,
For Time long past.

The brave, the gentle and the beautiful,
The child of grace and genius.

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead;
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.

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.

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

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.

On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.

It stirs
Too much of suffocating sorrow!

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.

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:-the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.

Winter is come and gone,But grief returns with the revolving year.

Oh, that I once again were mad!

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.

O storm of death,
Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night!

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.

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.

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,

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.

And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of Heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,
As still as a brooding dove.

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

Does the dark gate of death
Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,
O Sleep?

Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight.

they know not--till the night of death,
As sunset that strange vision, severeth
Our memory from itself, and us from all
We sought and yet were baffled.

You cannot see his eyes--they are two wells
Of liquid love.

Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul?

A gradual change was here
Yet ghastly.

Did thine own mind afford no scope
Of love, or moving thoughts to thee?

The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us.