Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes (315 Quotes)


    Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
    And come, for some uncertain moments lent.

    Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.

    Good-night ah no the hour is ill Which severs those it should unite Let us remain together still, Then it will be good night.





    Day and night, day and night,
    He was my breath and life and light,
    For three short years, which soon were passed.

    Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong They learn in suffering what they teach in song.


    Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
    Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
    That these stingless drones may spoil
    The forced produce of your toil?


    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.

    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.

    All things are sold the very light of heaven is venal earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.

    Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

    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...

    There is emotion
    In all that dwells at noontide here;
    Then through the intricate wild wood
    A maze of life and light and motion
    Is woven.


    In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.

    The sense that he was greater than his kind
    Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind
    By gazing on its own exceeding light.



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

    And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still
    Guiding its irresistible career
    In thy devastating omnipotence,
    Art king of this frail world!

    Obedient to the light
    That shone within his soul, he went, pursuing
    The windings of the dell.




    If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
    If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
    A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

    Oh, 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.


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

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

    Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions
    In music's most serene dominions;
    Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.

    Wake thou," cried Misery, "childless Mother, rise
    Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart's core,
    A wound more fierce than his, with tears and sighs.


    Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild
    And terrorless as this serenest night.

    And such," he cried, "is our mortality,
    And this must be the emblem and the sign
    Of what should be eternal and divine!

    And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
    If to the human mind's imaginings
    Silence and solitude were vacancy?


    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.

    Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud I fall upon the thorns of life I bleed.

    I knew
    What to the evil world is due,
    And therefore sternly did refuse
    To link me with the infamy
    Of one so lost as Helen.


    I did groan
    To think that a most unambitious slave,
    Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave
    Of Liberty.




    Not all to that bright station dar'd to climb;
    And happier they their happiness who knew,
    Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time
    In which suns perish'd; others more sublime,
    Struck by the envious wrath of man or god,
    Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime;
    And some yet live, treading the thorny road,
    Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode.

    'Tis like a child's belovèd corse
    A father watches, till at last
    Beauty is like remembrance, cast
    From Time long past.


    Related Authors


    Shel Silverstein - Robert Frost - Thomas Middleton - Sylvia Plath - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Robert Browning - Octavio Paz - Geoffrey Chaucer - Edward Young - Anne Sexton


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