Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

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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 howl of self-interest is loud... but the heart is black which throbs solely to its note.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Fame, power, and gold, are loved for their own sakes - are worshipped with a blind, habitual idolatry.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun O'er which clouds are brightening, Thou dost float and run Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this dim world
That the pale name of priest might shrink and dwindle
Into the Hell from which it first was furled.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
And nearer to the river's trembling edge There grew broad flag-flowers, purple prankt with white; And starry river buds among the sedge; And floating water-lilies broad and bright.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
I am not much of a hand at love songs, you see I mingle metaphysics with even this, but perhaps in this age of Philosophy that may be excused.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Our Adonais has drunk poisonoh! What deaf and viperous murderer could crown Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley
If certain Critics were as clearsighted as they are malignant, how great would be the benefit to be derived from their writings!

Percy Bysshe Shelley
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not, the beautiful.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
It is only by hearsay (by word of mouth passed down from generation to generation) that whole peoples adore the God of their fathers and of their priests: authority, confidence, submission and custom with them take the place of conviction or of proofs: they prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers taught them to prostrate themselves and pray: but why did their fathers fall on their knees?

Percy Bysshe Shelley
If all the thought which had been expended on the construction of engines of agony and death - the modes of aggression and defence, the raising of armies, and the acquirement of those arts of tyranny and falsehood without which mixed multitudes could neither be led nor governed - had been employed to promote the true welfare and extend the real empire of man, how different would have been the present situation of human society!

Percy Bysshe Shelley