Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
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.
Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.
I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
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.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
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.
How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - he hath awakened from the dream of life - 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.
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.
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
The soul's joy lies in doing.
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!
