Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley

"O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

"… obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame, A mechanized automaton."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted."

"Death is the veil which those who live call life They sleep, and it is lifted."

"Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age."

"Familiar acts are beautiful through love."

"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

"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 a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

"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 the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

"Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar."

"The unquiet republic of the maze Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness."

"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."

"Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness."

"What 'twas weak to do 'Tis weaker to lament, once being done."

"The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

"Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches."

"Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things."

"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds."

"Heaven's ebon vault, Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world."

"Fear not for the future, weep not for the past."

"In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect."

"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."

"Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker."

"War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade."

"Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves."

"Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory."

"History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man."