Quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley

A man, to be greatly good, must magine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and in many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.

Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, -- but it returneth.

Man who man would be, must rule the empire of himself.

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell the saddest thoughts.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep -- he hath awakened from the dream of life -- 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.

Rough wind, that moanest loudGrief too sad for songWild wind, when sullen cloudKnells all the night longSad storm, whose tears are vain,Bare woods, whose branches strain,Deep caves and dreary main, - Wail, for the world's wrong

When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.

Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In one spirit meet and mingle. Why not I with thine?

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

Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro' the spirit's gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.

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.

O weep for Adonis - He is dead." "Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep - he hath wakened from the dream of life

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

He wanders, like a day-appearing dream, Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.

For love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change.

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 creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed -but it returneth.

In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.

I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.