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.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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.

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.

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

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

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.