Quotes By Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.

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.

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.

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

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

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

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.

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

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.

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

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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.