Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes
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Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number - Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you - Ye are many - they are few.
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Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
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The quick Dreams, The passion-winged Ministers of thought.
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In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
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Rough wind, the moanest loud Grief too sad for song; Wild wind, when sullen cloud Knells all the night long; Sad storm, whose tears are vain, Bare woods, whose branches strain, Deep caves and dreary main, - Wail, for the world's wrong!
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Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, - but it returneth!
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Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.
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Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
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My father Time is weak and gray With waiting for a better day; See how idiot-like he stands, Fumbling with his palsied hands!
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The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
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Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.
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He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead; Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now - Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.
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Chameleons feed on light and air: Poets' food is love and fame.
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Me - who am as a nerve o'er which do creep The else unfelt oppressions of this earth, And was to thee the flame upon thy hearth, When all beside was cold: - that thou on me Shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony!
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Peace is in the grave. The grave hides all things beautiful and good. I am a God and cannot find it there, Nor would I seek it; for, though dread revenge, This is defeat, fierce king, not victory.
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Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
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Sun-girt City, thou hast been Ocean's child, and then his queen; Now is come a darker day, And thou soon must be his prey.
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He lives, he wakes - 'tis Death is dead, not he; Mourn not for Adonais. - Thou young Dawn, Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone.
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There grew pied wind-flowers and violets, Daisies, those pearl’d Arcturi of the earth, The constellated flower that never sets; Faint oxlips; tender bluebells at whose birth The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets Its mother’s face with heaven-collected tears, When the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it hears.
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The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.
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All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
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He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, Nor heed nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality!
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Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
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An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, - Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn, - mud from a muddy spring, - Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.