Quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley

War is the statesman's game

Though the sound overpowers, Sing again, with your dear voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one.

It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen.

Swift stars with flashing tresses

Before we aspire after theoretical perfection in the amelioration of our political state, it is necessary that we possess those advantages which we have been cheated of, and which the experience of modern times has proved that nations even under the present conditions are susceptible.

Equality in possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinements of civilization; it is one of the conditions of that system of society towards which, with whatever hope of ultimate success, it is our duty to tend.

Seek far from noise and day some western cave, Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds A lulling murmur weave?— [_30 Ianthe] doth not sleep The dreamless sleep of death:- Shelley, Percy Bysshe (2011-03-24). The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete (Kindle Locations 317-319). . Kindle Edition.

Toward whatsoever we regard as perfect, undoubtedly, it is no less our duty than it is our nature to press forward; this is the generous enthusiasm which accomplishes not indeed the consummation after which it aspires, but one which approaches it in a degree far nearer than if the whole powers had not been developed by a delusion. It is in politics rather than in religion that faith is meritorious.

It is better that we gain what we demand by a process of negotiation which would occupy twenty years, than that by communicating a sudden shock to the interests of those who are the depositaries and dependents of power we should incur the calamity which their revenge might inflict upon us by giving the signal of . . . war.

We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice; we

We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The

Science, Poetry, and Thought Are thy lamps; they make the lot Of the dwellers in a cot So serene, they curse it not.

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The

let deeds, not words, express Thine exceeding loveliness.

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 colour and odour, 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

Yes! all is past—swift time has fled away, Yet its swell pauses on my sickening mind; How long will horror nerve this frame of clay? I'm dead, and lingers yet my soul behind. Oh! powerful Fate, revoke thy deadly spell, And yet that may not ever, ever be, Heaven will not smile upon the work of Hell; Ah! no, for Heaven cannot smile on me; Fate, envious Fate, has sealed my wayward destiny.

I heard, as all have heard, the various story Of human life, and wept unwilling tears.

Reason respects the differences, and Imagination the similitudes of things.

Siamo noi che, perduti in tempestose visioni, conduciamo una vana lotta contro gli spettri, e in una folle trance con il coltello dello spirito colpiamo, invulnerabili, nulla.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world":

that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.

GözyaÅŸlar? için fazla derin" bir keder bu.

I think one is always in love with something or other

How much longer will man continue to pimp for the gluttony of death, his most insidious, implacable, and eternal foe?