Quotes 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.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

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

I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.

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.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.

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

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

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.

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

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.

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

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

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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

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.

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.

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.

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?