Quotes from 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 with ill.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;Envy and calumny and hate and pain,And that unrest which men miscall delightCan touch him not and torture not again;From the contagion of the world's slow stainHe is secure, and now can never mournA heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain.

From the dust of creeds outworn.

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrateWith thine own hues all thou dost shine uponOf human thought or form.

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;To love, and bear; to hope till Hope createsFrom its own wreck the thing it contemplates;Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;This, like thy glory, Titan, is to beGood, great and joyous, beautiful and free;This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Till the Future daresForget the Past, his fate and fame shall beAn echo and a light unto eternity!

Men of England, wherefore plowFor the lords who lay ye low?

Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory;Odors, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken.Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,Are heaped for the beloved's bed;And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,Love itself shall slumber on.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder....

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.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!Bird thou never wert,That from Heaven, or near it,Pourest thy full heartIn profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

I weep for Adonais [John Keats]—he is dead!Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tearsThaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!

The awful shadow of some unseen PowerFloats though unseen among us—visitingThis various world with as inconstant wingAs summer winds that creep from flower to flower.

The desire of the moth for the star,Of the night for the morrow,The devotion to something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow.

I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

The soul of Adonais, like a star,Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves deadAre driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,Pestilence-stricken multitudes.

Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!

Peace is in the grave.The grave hides all things beautiful and good:I am a God and cannot find it there.

To that high capital, where kingly DeathKeeps his pale court in beauty and decay,He came.