Quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

The soul's joy lies in doing.

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of Eternity

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

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

The desire of the moth for the star

By solemn vision and bright silver dream His infancy was nurtured. Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.

Poetry] strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bear the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.

Whatever may be his [man's] true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution (change and extinction). This is the character of all life and being - each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are contained. - "On Life

If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is love.

You are now In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. Yet in its depth what treasures!

Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim

The indignity of your fate is the will of one more powerful.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - He hath awakened from the dream of life

Perhaps the only comfort which remains Is the unheeded clanking of my chains, The which I make, and call it melody.

Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror!

Friendship, a dear balm... A smile among dark frowns: a beloved light: A solitude, a refuge, a delight.

I can give not what men call love; But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the heavens reject not: The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?

The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.

What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

Love, hope, and self-esteem, like clouds depart And come, for some uncertain moments lent. Man were immortal and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.

And the sunlight claps the earth, And the moonbeam kiss the sea, What is all these sweet work worth, If thou kiss not me.