Quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley

God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.

The thoughts which the word "God" suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves.

Peace is in the grave. The grave hides all things beautiful and good. I am a God and cannot find it there, Nor would I seek it; for, though dread revenge, This is defeat, fierce king, not victory.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

The nature of a narrow and malevolent spirit is so essentially incompatible with happiness as to render it inaccessible to the influences of the benignant God.

A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.

Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth.

Through the sunset of hope, Like the shapes of a dream, What paradise islands of glory gleam!

To hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.

Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy.

Love! dearest, sweetest power! how much are we indebted to thee! How much superior are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources!

So soon as this want or power [of love] is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.

This is Heaven, when pain and evil cease, and when the Benignant Principle, untrammelled and uncontrolled, visits in the fulness of its power the universal frame of things.

Titles are tinsel, power a corrupter, glorya bubble, and excessive wealth a libel on its possessor.

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.

Jealousy's eyes are green.

There is no real wealth but the labor of man.

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.