-
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
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
-
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
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 -
Death will come when thou art dead, Soon, too soon - Sleep will come when thou art fled; Of neither would I ask the boon I ask of thee, beloved Night - Swift be thine approaching flight, Come soon, soon!
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 -
He died, Who was the Sire of an immortal strain, Blind, old, and lonely.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
-
The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
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 -
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame Over his living head like Heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Have you not heard When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo, His best friends hear no more of him?
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
-
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine, Yet let's be merry: we'll have tea and toast; Custards for supper, and an endless host Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies, And other such ladylike luxuries.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
It doth repent me; words are quick and vain; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
That orbed maiden with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon.
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
-
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 -
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
GOVERNMENT has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being.
Percy Bysshe Shelley