Quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Sounds of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain awaken'd flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass

The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?

A sensitive plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan like leaves to the light, and closed them beneath the kisses of night.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; the subject, not the citizen... The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Spirit, Patience, Gentleness, All that can adorn and bless Art thou let deeds, not words, express Thine exceeding loveliness.

Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found.

The babe is at peace within the womb, the corpse is at rest within the tomb. We begin in what we end.

It is vain philosophy that supposes more causes than are exactly adequate to explain the phenomena of things.

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

I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted

Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being.

It is impossible that had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons.

When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven.

Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches.

There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

So is Hope Changed for Despair-one laid upon the shelf, We take the other. Under heaven's high cope Fortune is god-all you endure and do Depends on circumstance as much as you.

Gold is a living god and rules in scorn, All earthly things but virtue.

Everytime we say that god is the author of some phenomenon, that signifies that we are ignorant of how such a phenomenon was caused by the forces of nature.

God is a hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof; the onus probandi rests on the theist.