Quotes from 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.

Contemporary criticism only represents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with.

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

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.

Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

Best and brightest, come away!

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

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.

That orbed maiden, with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon.

Thou dirgeOf the dying year, to which this closing nightWill be the dome of a vast sepulcher.

Are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar?

...Ere midnight's frown and morning's smile, ere thou and peace may meet.

Heaven's ebon vault, Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.

Teach me half the gladnessThat thy brain must know,Such harmonious madness,From my lips would flow,The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Forms more real than living man,Nurslings of immortality!

The One remains, the many change and pass;Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly;Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,Stains the white radiance of eternity,Until Death tramples it to fragments—Die,If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

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.

Power, like a desolating pestilence,Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,A mechanized automaton.

The world is weary of the past,Oh, might it die or rest at last!

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

To know nor faith, nor love nor law; to beOmnipotent but friendless is to reign.

Hell is a city much like London—A populous and smoky city.