Percy Bysshe Shelley - Poetry Quotes

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own.... The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.

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
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Here I swear, and as I break my oath may Infinity Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge... Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again — I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.

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
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness...and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.

Percy Bysshe Shelley