Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley
But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,...
To that high Capital, where kingly Death Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, He came.
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo, His best friends hear no more of him.
Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is slumber,...
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery.
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.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
He lives, he wakes,—'tis Death is dead, not he;
Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes what'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame, A mechanized automaton.
and so this tree— Oh, that such our death may be!—...
The whispering waves were half asleep, The clouds were gone to play, And on the bosom of the deep The smile of Heaven lay;
The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them....
It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.
There was no corn -- in the wide market-place all loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold; They weighed it in small scales -- and many a face was fixed in eager horror then; his gold the miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain.
And whether life had been before that sleep The Heaven which I imagine, or a Hell...
All things are sold: the very light of Heaven Is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love,...
He hath awakened from the dream of life—
Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil
A man, to be greatly good, must magine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and in many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker, so an unsuccessful author turns critic
Yes, marriage is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequite...
One word is too often profaned For me to profane it; One feeling too falsely disdain'd For thee to disdain it
