Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
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.
To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.
It is impossible that had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons.
The gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
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.
Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
The Galilean is not a favorite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favor, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership.
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night; envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again; from the contagion of the world's slow stain, he is secure.
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.
Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
Nought may endure but Mutability.
January gray is here, like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier, march with grief doth howl and rave, and April weeps - but, O ye hours! Follow with May's fairest flowers.
All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire is most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still.
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, satins the white radiance of Eternity, until Death tramples it to fragments.
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.
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.
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
