Quotes by Percy Shelley

• Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
• Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
• Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
• 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.
• Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
• 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.
• 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.
• All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
• A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
• 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.
• 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.
• Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
• 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.
• Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
• Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
• Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
• O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
• Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
• Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
• 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.
• 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.
• Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
• In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
• If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
• 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.
• I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.
• History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
• Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
• 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.
• Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
• 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.
• 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.
• Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.
• Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
• There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
• 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!
• The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
• The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
• The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
• The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
• Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
• Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
• The soul's joy lies in doing.
• 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.
• Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.