Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, -- a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field...
O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb,
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.
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.
Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
Never again may blood of bird or beast/ Stain with its venomous stream a human feast,/ To the pure skies in accusation steaming. “I wish no living thing to suffer pain."
Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart...
I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won
...What are numbers knit By force or custom? Man who man would be, Must rule the empire of himself; in it Must be supreme, establishing his throne On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.
In honored poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty;—...
All things are sold: the very light of heaven is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.
With plough and spade, and hoe and loom, Trace your grave, and build your tomb,...
There is no real wealth but the labour of man.
We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.
No longer now/ He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,/ And horribly devours his mangled flesh;/ Which, still avenging nature's broken law,/ Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,/ All evil passions, and all vain belief,/ Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,/ The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.”
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,...
Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches.
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one.
It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower -- and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
Death is the veil which those who live call life: They sleep—and it is lifted
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal. Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
Winter is come and gone, But grief returns with the revolving year.
