Famous Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotations

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"To be Omnipotent but friendless is to reign."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"A man, to be greatly good, must magine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and in many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker, so an unsuccessful author turns critic"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Fear not for the future, weep not for the past."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"First our pleasures die - and then our hopes, and then our fears - and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust - and we die too"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"I love tranquil solitude And such society As is quiet, wise, and good."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"One word is too often profaned For me to profane it; One feeling too falsely disdain'd For thee to disdain it"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Our sweetest songs are those that tell the saddest thoughts."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Rough wind, that moanest loudGrief too sad for songWild wind, when sullen cloudKnells all the night longSad storm, whose tears are vain,Bare woods, whose branches strain,Deep caves and dreary main, - Wail, for the world's wrong"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"There is no real wealth but the labour of man."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and the barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"No longer now/ He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,/ And horribly devours his mangled flesh;/ Which, still avenging nature's broken law,/ Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,/ All evil passions, and all vain belief,/ Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,/ The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.”"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Never again may blood of bird or beast/ Stain with its venomous stream a human feast,/ To the pure skies in accusation steaming. “I wish no living thing to suffer pain.'"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"...What are numbers knit By force or custom? Man who man would be, Must rule the empire of himself; in it Must be supreme, establishing his throne On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy Of hopes and fears, being himself alone."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The soul's joy lies in doing."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Familiar acts are beautiful through love."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The more we study the more we discover our ignorance."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"All things are sold: the very light of heaven is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes what'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame, A mechanized automaton."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, 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 the burthen of the curse of Babel."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, -- a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"All things are sold: the very light of Heaven Is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love,..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"and so this tree— Oh, that such our death may be!—..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"And whether life had been before that sleep The Heaven which I imagine, or a Hell..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Death is the veil which those who live call life: They sleep—and it is lifted"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"He lives, he wakes,—'tis Death is dead, not he;"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"He hath awakened from the dream of life—"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"In honored poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty;—..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb,"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is slumber,..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them...."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The whispering waves were half asleep, The clouds were gone to play, And on the bosom of the deep The smile of Heaven lay;"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"To that high Capital, where kingly Death Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, He came."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"When hearts have one mingled, Love first leaves the well-built nest;..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo, His best friends hear no more of him."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Yes, marriage is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequite..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"With plough and spade, and hoe and loom, Trace your grave, and build your tomb,..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart..."
by Percy Bysshe Shelley


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