Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes (315 Quotes)


    While yet a boy I sough for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.


    Like a high-born maiden
    In a palace tower,
    Soothing her love-laden
    Soul in secret hour
    With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

    What avail
    Are prayers and tears, which chase denial
    From the fierce savage nursed in hate?



    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.


    A sexless thing it was, and in its growth
    It seemed to have developed no defect
    Of either sex, yet all the grace of both.

    Sing again, with your dear voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one.

    It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.

    Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality it strikes at the rootof all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery.

    Waking or asleep,
    Thou of death must deem
    Things more true and deep
    Than we mortals dream,
    Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

    A light is passed from the revolving year,
    And man, and woman; and what still is dear
    Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.

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

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


    The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,
    And Silence, too enamoured of that voice,
    Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.

    An unskilled hand, yet one informed
    With genius, had the marble warmed
    With that pathetic life.

    And music lifted up the listening spirit Until it walked, exempt from mortal care, Godlike, o'er the clear billows of sweet sound.

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




    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.

    One darkest glen
    Sends from its woods of musk-rose twined with jasmine
    A soul-dissolving odor to invite
    To some more lovely mystery.

    Ask why the sunlight not for ever
    Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
    Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
    Why fear and dream and death and birth
    Cast on the daylight of this earth
    Such gloom, -- why man has such a scope
    For love and hate, despondency and hope?

    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.





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

    Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.

    Let there be light said Liberty, And like sunrise from the sea, Athens arose.


    The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame Over his living head like heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow.



    Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object can not live.

    Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.




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


    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.

    Ah, when shall day dawn on the night of the grave,
    Or summer succeed to the winter of death?


    the gathering winds will call the darkness soon,
    And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of heaven.



    Related Authors


    Rabindranath Tagore - Edgar Allan Poe - Alexander Pope - William Congreve - Thomas Moore - Thomas Gray - Novalis - Elizabeth Bishop - Dylan Thomas - A. E. Housman


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