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
Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Obedience
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: Friends, Friend, World, Ignorance, Envy, Kind
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Vegetarianism
Nothing in the world is single; all things by law divine in one spirit mix and mingle. Why not I with thine?
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Life
War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: War
Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Hope
Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.
—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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Religion
Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Sorrow, Pleasure, Tragedy
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
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Life
It is not a merit to tolerate, but rather a crime to be intolerant.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Man’s yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Change
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Self-Control, Greatness & Great Things, Discipline
I know the past, and thence I will essay to glean a warning for the future, so that man may profit by his errors, and derive experience from his folly.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Experience, Past
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!
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Seasons, Harmony, Autumn
Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Generosity
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: Grief, Bereavement, Grieving
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Critics, Criticism
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
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
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Love
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
The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Study, Learning
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Dying, Death
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
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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