Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

"A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own."

"All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire is most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still."

"All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth."

"Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim."

"Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay."

"Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted."

"Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted."

"Familiar acts are beautiful through love."

"Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay."

"He has outsoared the shadow of our night; envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again; from the contagion of the world's slow stain, he is secure."

"History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man."

"How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep."

"I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity."

"In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect."

"Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker."

"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."

"January gray is here, like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier, march with grief doth howl and rave, and April weeps - but, O ye hours! Follow with May's fairest flowers."

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, satins the white radiance of Eternity, until Death tramples it to fragments."

"Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."

"Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability."

"Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon."

"Nought may endure but Mutability."

"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."

"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - he hath awakened from the dream of life - 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife."

"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

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

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

"Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age."

"Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic."

"Soul meets soul on lovers' lips."

"The Galilean is not a favorite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favor, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership."

"The gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present."

"The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

"The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys."

"The more we study the more we discover our ignorance."

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

"The soul's joy lies in doing."

"There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!"

"There is no real wealth but the labor of man."

"To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign."

"War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade."

"When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem."