Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

398 Sourced Quotes

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
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause.

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

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
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
I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on wh. we trample are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.

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
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
This is Heaven, when pain and evil cease, and when the Benignant Principle, untrammelled and uncontrolled, visits in the fulness of its power the universal frame of things.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
There the sea I found Calm as a cradled child in dreamless slumber bound.

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 best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
There are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The emptiness and folly of retaliation are apparent from every example which can be brought forward. Not only Jesus Christ, but the most eminent professors of every sect of philosophy, have reasoned against this futile superstition.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
This, and no other, is justice: — to consider, under all the circumstances and consequences of a particular case, how the greatest quantity and purest quality of happiness will ensue from any action... there is no other justice.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes;
And yet I pity those they torture not.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
What hand would crush the silken-winged fly, The youngest of inconstant April's minions, Because it cannot climb the purest sky, Where the swan sings, amid the sun's dominions? Not thine.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
'tis He, arrayed In the soft light of his own smiles, which spread Like radiance from the cloud-surrounded moon....

Percy Bysshe Shelley
How beautiful is sunset when the glow Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!

Percy Bysshe Shelley