Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

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Worse than despair,
Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead —
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights
The fairest feelings of the opening heart,
Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil
Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,
And judgment cease to wage unnatural war
With passion's unsubduable array.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
His fine wit
Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.
Of Thomas Love peacock

Percy Bysshe Shelley
In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.

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
Beneath is spread like a green sea
The waveless plain of Lombardy.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim,
Seven bloodhounds followed him.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, — that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
And bid them love each other and be blest:
And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves,
And come and be my guest, — for I am Love's.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep —
He hath awakened from the dream of life.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
To that high Capital, where kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Titles are tinsel, power a corrupter, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth a libel on its possessor.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves!

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley
It is probable that what we call thought is not an actual being, but no more than the relation between certain parts of that infinitely varied mass, of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceases to exist as soon as those parts change their position with regard to each other.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
First our pleasures die — and then
Our hopes, and then our fears — and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust — and we die too.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal. Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Welcome, Friend!
I have to tell you that, since we last met,
I have endured a wrong so great and strange,
That neither life nor death can give me rest.
Ask me not what it is, for there are deeds
Which have no form, sufferings
which have no tongue.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Age cannot Love destroy,
But perfidy can blast the flower,
Even when in most unwary hour
It blooms in Fancy's bower.
Age cannot Love destroy,
But perfidy can rend the shrine
In which its vermeil splendours shine.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Jesus Christ represented God as the principle of all good, the source of all happiness, the wise and benevolent Creator and Preserver of all living things. But the interpreters of his doctrines have confounded the good and the evil principle.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Monarchy is only the string that ties the robber's bundle.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet, and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The butchering of harmless animals cannot fail to produce much of that spirit of insane and hideous exultation in which news of a victory is related altho' purchased by the massacre of a hundred thousand men.
If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.

Percy Bysshe Shelley