Quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley

Most vain all hope but love. - Prometheus Unbound

I dare not guess; but in this life Of error, ignorance, and strife, Where nothing is, but all things seem, And we the shadows of the dream, It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant, if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.

If there are no reasons to suppose that we have existed before that period at which our existence apparently commences, then there are no grounds for supposing that we shall continue to exist after our existence has apparently ceased.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.

Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.

birth but wakes the spirit to the sense Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape New modes of passion to its frame may lend; Life is its state of action, and the store Of all events is aggregated there That variegate the eternal universe; Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom, That leads to azure isles and beaming skies And happy regions of eternal hope.

The cold earth steps below, Above the cold sky shone; And all around, with a chilling sound, From caves of ice and fields of snow, The breathe of night like death did flow Beneath the sinking moon.

The fitful alternations of the rain, When the chill wind, languid as with pain Of its own heavy moisture, here and there Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere.

The highest moral purpose aimed at tn the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself;

I could not choose but gaze; a fascination Dwelt in that moon, and sky, and clouds

O Spirit! fearlessly bear on. Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom, Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth To feed with kindliest dews its favorite flower, That blooms in mossy bank and darksome glens, Lighting the greenwood with its sunny smile.

Then she arose, and smiled on me with eyes Serene yet sorrowing

Like an infant's smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. - Adonais

Paradise spread forth beyond the shadowy grave

Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene The actors or spectators? Great and mean Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow. As long as skies are blue and fields are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow. - Adonais

tomes / Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance

We—are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar; Such difference without discord, as can make Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake As trembling leaves in a continuous air?

Know then, that when this grief had been subdued, I was not left, like others, cold and dead

True Love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away. Love is like understanding, that grows bright Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light, Imagination! which from earth and sky, And from the depths of human fantasy, As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow Of its reverberated lightning. Epipsychidion

To the oblivion whither I and thou, All loving and all lovely, hasten now With steps, ah, too unequal! may we meet In one Elysium or one winding-sheet! If any should be curious to discover Whether to you I am a friend or lover, Let them read Shakespeare's sonnets, taking thence

Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race.

Seemed it that the chariot's way Lay through the midst of an immense concave Radiant with million constellations, tinged With shades of infinite color, And semicircled with a belt Flashing incessant meteors.

the vast theme Of those impassioned songs, when Cythna sate Amid the calm which rapture doth create After its tumult, her heart vibrating, Her spirit o'er the Ocean's floating state From her deep eyes far wandering... From "Revolt of Islam", Canto 2, Verse 29

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.