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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Bereavement, Grief, Grieving
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Difficulty, Winter, Hope, Future, Seasons
I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Life
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Revenge
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Marriage
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Wealth, Luxury
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Government
Win and wear her if you can.—She is the most delightful of God’s creatures—Heaven’s best gift—man’s joy and pride in prosperity, and his support and comfort in affliction.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Woman
Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Kind, Ignorance, Friends, Envy, Friend, World
The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Fashion, Dress
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Imagination, Goodness
I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Snow
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Nature, Mountains
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Theater
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Change
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Vegetarianism
Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Love
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Study, Learning
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Economy, Economics
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Death, Dying
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Man’s yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Change
Mild is the slow necessity of death;
The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp,
Without a groan, almost without a fear,
Resigned in peace to the necessity;
Calm as a voyager to some distant land,
And full of wonder, full of hope as he.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Death
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the heights of love’s rare universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire—
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Love
A sensitive plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
and closed them beneath the kisses of night.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Light
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Argument
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Power
All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth. – Shelley, Percy Bysshe
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Progress, Improvement, Self-improvement
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- William Wordsworth English Poet
- Algernon Charles Swinburne English Poet
- William Blake English Poet
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge English Poet
- John Gay English Poet, Dramatist
- Edwin Arnold English Poet
- Bernard Mandeville British Writer
- Edmund Spenser English Poet
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning English Poet
- John Milton English Poet
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