Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

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Ah! what a divine religion might be found out, if charity were really made the principle of it, instead of faith.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Twilight, ascending slowly from the east,
Entwined in duskier wreaths her braided locks
O'er the fair front and radiant eyes of day,
Night followed, clad with stars.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
To know nor faith, nor love, nor law, to be
Omnipotent but friendless, is to reign.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
He wanders, like a day-appearing dream, Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.

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
Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,
And feeds her grief.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
… why God made irreconcilable
Good and the means of good.

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
Cease, cease, wayward Mortal! I dare not unveil
The shadows that float o'er Eternity's vale;
Nought waits for the good but a spirit of Love,
That will hail their blest advent to regions above.
For Love, Mortal, gleams through the gloom of my sway,
And the shades which surround me fly fast at its ray.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
It is our will
That thus enchains us to permitted ill.
We might be otherwise, we might be all
We dream of happy, high, majestical.
Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek,
But in our mind? and if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire?

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
… they who wore
Mitres and helms and crowns, or wreaths of light,
Signs of thought's empire over thought —their lore
Taught them not this, to know themselves; their might
Could not repress the mystery within.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
You would not easily guess
All the modes of distress
Which torture the tenants of earth;
And the various evils,
Which like so many devils,
Attend the poor souls from their birth.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Kingly conclaves stern and cold
Where blood with guilt is bought and sold.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Be your strong and simple words
Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be,
With their shade to cover ye.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thou too, O Comet, beautiful and fierce, Who drew the heart of this frail Universe Towards thine own; till, wrecked in that convulsion, Alternating attraction and repulsion, Thine went astray, and that was rent in twain; Oh, float into our Azure heaven again!

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the heights of love's rare universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire--
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Of Fate, and Chance, and God, and Chaos old.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
O! I burn with impatience for the moment of the dissolution of intolerance; it has injured me.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore, Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable sea?

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lie bills and calculations much perplexed, With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint Traced over them in blue and yellow paint.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks, A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books, Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures,-disentangle them who may.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The advocates of literal interpretation have been the most efficacious enemies of those doctrines whose nature they profess to venerate.

Percy Bysshe Shelley