Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes
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I never thought before my death to see Youth's vision thus made perfect.
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A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light. And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.
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Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, These are the seals of that most firm assurance Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength; And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length; These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o’er the disentangled doom.
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By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system.
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Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
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I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, When the winds are breathing low, And the stars are shining bright.
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You would not easily guess All the modes of distress Which torture the tenants of earth; And the various evils, Which like so many devils, Attend the poor souls from their birth.
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One word is too often profaned For me to profane it; One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it.
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Titles are tinsel, power a corruptor, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth, a libel on its possessor.
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Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
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From the haunts of daily life Where is waged the daily strife With common wants and common cares Which sows the human heart with tares.
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Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
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Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.
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Swiftly walk over the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, - Swift be thy flight!
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Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes; And yet I pity those they torture not.
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What! alive, and so bold, O earth?
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Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
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Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
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Best and brightest, come away!
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The sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea: What are all these kissings worth If thou kiss not me?
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Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
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On a poet's lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept.
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If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!
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And like a prophetess of May Strewed flowers upon the barren way, Making the wintry world appear Like one on whom thou smilest, dear.