Quotes By Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.

In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.

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.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

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.

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.

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

There is no real wealth but the labor of man.

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.

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.

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.