Quotes by Shelley, Percy Bysshe




Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 July 8, 1822) was one of the major English romantic poets and is esteemed by some scholars the finest lyric poet in the English language. He is perhaps most widely famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy; but his major works were long visionary poems such as Adonais and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism made him a notorious and much denigrated figure in his own life, but he became the idol of the following two or three generations of poets (including the major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats.) He was also famous for his association with contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, and, like them, for his untimely death at a young age. He was married to the famous novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein..

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on death
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"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."

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on death
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"Man who man would be, must rule the empire of himself."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on empire    Share

"Familiar acts are beautiful through love."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on familiarity    Share

"There was no corn -- in the wide market-place all loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold; They weighed it in small scales -- and many a face was fixed in eager horror then; his gold the miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on famine    Share

"Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on fidelity    Share

"Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on forgiveness    Share

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on the future    Share

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on generosity    Share

"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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on goodness    Share

"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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on government
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"The soul's joy lies in doing."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on happiness    Share

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on hope    Share

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on imagination    Share

"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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on jesus christ    Share

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on labor    Share

"To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on leadership    Share

"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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on argument    Share

"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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on love
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"Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry."

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"Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal. Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on mountains    Share

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on music    Share

"Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on nature    Share

"Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life... is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on obscenity    Share

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on poetry and poets    Share

"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on poetry and poets    Share

"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!"

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on autumn
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"Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches."

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"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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on religion    Share

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on revenge    Share

"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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on seasons    Share

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on self-improvement    Share

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on sorrow    Share

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on studying
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"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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on bereavement    Share

"Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, -- but it returneth."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on change
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Shelley, Percy Bysshe - 93px-Portrait_of_Percy_Bysshe_Shelley_by_Curran_1819.jpeg - Portrait by Amelia Curran, 1819   Photos >>