English – Poet August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822
Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The soul’s joy lies in doing.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Man’s yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, the lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
First our pleasures die – and then our hopes, and then our fears – and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust – and we die too.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
