Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

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And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave;
A dupe and a deceiver; a decay;
A traveler from the cradle to the grave Through the dim light of this immortal day.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Pilgrim of Eternity [Lord Byron], 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.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
You will see Coleridge—he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind,
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair—
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.
Of Samuel Taylor coleridge

Percy Bysshe Shelley
I am gone into the fields
To take what this sweet hour yields; —
Reflection, you may come tomorrow,
Sit by the fireside with Sorrow. —
You with the unpaid bill, Despair, —
You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care, —
I will pay you in the grave, —
Death will listen to your stave.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Let there be light! said Liberty,
And like sunrise from the sea,
Athens arose!

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley
A widow bird sat mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
What softer voice is hushed over the dead?
Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?
What form leans sadly o'er the white death — bed,
In mockery of monumental stone,
The heavy heart heaving without a moan?

Percy Bysshe Shelley
And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest,
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air,
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The discussion of any subject is a right that you have brought into the world with your heart and tongue. Resign your heart's blood before you part with this inestimable privilege of man.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen

Percy Bysshe Shelley
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
No man has a right to disturb the public peace, by personally resisting the execution of a law however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason, to promote its repeal.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
From the haunts of daily life
Where is waged the daily strife
With common wants and common cares
Which sows the human heart with tares.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,
Daisies, those pearl'd Arcturi of the earth,
The constellated flower that never sets;
Faint oxlips; tender bluebells at whose birth
The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets
Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears,
When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
I never thought before my death to see
Youth's vision thus made perfect.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon —
Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night —
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!

Percy Bysshe Shelley
You lie—under a mistake,
For this is the most civil sort of lie
That can be given to a man's face. I now
Say what I think.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The pale stars are gone!
For the sun, their swift shepherd,
To their folds them compelling,
In the depths of the dawn,
Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and the flee
Beyond his blue dwelling,
As fawns flee the leopard.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
A single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought.

Percy Bysshe Shelley