Quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley

All he had loved, and moulded into thought, From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound, Lamented Adonais. Morning sought Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound, Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground, Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day; Afar the melancholy thunder moaned, Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay, And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.

I love tranquil solitude, And such society As is quiet, wise, and good. Song

And I have fitted up some chambers there Looking towards the golden Eastern air, And level with the living winds, which flow Like waves above the living waves below.— 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.

And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, and spies. Last came Anarchy: he rode On a white horse, splashed with blood; He was pale even to the lips, Like Death in the Apocalypse. And he wore a kingly crown; And in his grasp a sceptre shone; On his brow this mark I saw - "I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW.

There was a Being whom my spirit oft Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft. A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human, Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman....

One wandering thought pollutes the day;

The being called God...bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.

At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God's own heart?

I met Murder on the way - He had a mask like Castlereagh

Oh, weep for Adonais—he is dead! Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep; For he is gone, where all things wise and fair Descend—oh, dream not that the amorous Deep Will yet restore him to the vital air; Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.

Confound the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law.

And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare, Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.

Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

I had rather not have any more of my hopes and illusions mocked by sad realities.

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

to hope til Hope creates from its own wreak the thing it contemplates;

The secret strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a column, rests on thee, And what were thou and Earth and Stars and Sea If to the human mind's imaginings Silence and solitude were Vacancy?

Hell is a city much like London.

Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true

How wonderful is Death, Death, and his brother Sleep! One, pale as yonder waning moon With lips of lurid blue; The other, rosy as the morn When throned on ocean's wave It blushes o'er the world; Yet both so passing wonderful!

How long do you mean to be content?

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

Nought may endure but mutability

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.