Quotes By Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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.

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

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

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

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

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!

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.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.

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

When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.

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

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

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

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.

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.

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.

The soul's joy lies in doing.

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.

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

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.

There is no real wealth but the labor of man.

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

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

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