Quotes By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.

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

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.

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.

The soul's joy lies in doing.

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

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.

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

There is no real wealth but the labor of man.

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.

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

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

I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.

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.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.

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

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

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

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.

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.

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

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

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

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.

The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.