Quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs— To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind, While the touch of Nature's art Harmonizes heart to heart.

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.

I love all waste and solitary places; where we taste the pleasure of believing what we see. Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race; they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass

God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.

Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece

I have sent books and music there, and all / Those instruments with which high spirits call / The future from its cradle, and the past / Out of its grave, and make the present last / In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, / Folded within their own eternity.

I'm... like a poet hidden In the light of thought Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

That orbèd maiden, with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor By the midnight breezes strewn.

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

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds

No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.

One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdain'd For thee to disdain it. One hope too like dispair For prudence to smother, I can give not what men call love: But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And heaven rejects not: The desire of the moth for the star, The devotion of something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?

Death is here and death is there, Death is busy everywhere, All around, within, beneath, Above is death - and we are death. Death has set his mark and seal On all we are and all we feel, On all we know and all we fear, 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. All things that we love and cherish, Like ourselves must fade and perish; Such is our rude mortal lot - Love itself would, did they not.

You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circle less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights.

Chameleons feed on light and air: Poets food is love and fame.

To hope until hope creates from its very own wreck the thing it contemplates.

And others came... Desires and Adorations, Winged Persuasions and veil'd Destinies, Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies; And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs, And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam Of her own dying smile instead of eyes, Came in slow pomp; the moving pomp might seem Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

Joy, joy, joy! Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers, And the future is dark, and the present is spread, Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.

Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.

True Love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away. Epipsychidion

When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood, but because I know they're just sitting there, thinking up ways to get even.

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom