Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Good-night? ah! no; the hour is illWhich severs those it should unite;Let us remain together still,Then it will be good night.How can I call the lone night good,Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?Be it not said, thought, understood --Then it will be -- good night.To hearts which near each other moveFrom evening close to morning light,The night is good; because, my love,They never say good-night.”

“Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race.”

“What then is this harmony, this order that you maintain to have required for its establishment, what it needs not for its maintenance, the agency of a supernatural intelligence? Inasmuch as the order visible in the Universe requires one cause, so does the disorder whose operation is not less clearly apparent demand another. Order and disorder are no more than modifications of our own perceptions of the relations which subsist between ourselves and external objects, and if we are justified in inferring the operation of a benevolent power from the advantages attendant on the former, the evils of the latter bear equal testimony to the activity of a malignant principle, no less pertinacious in inducing evil out of good, than the other is unremitting in procuring good from evil.”

“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed !”

“[Poetry] strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bear the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.”

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

“I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear,— Till death like sleep might steal on me And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.”

“In friendships I had been most fortunateYet never saw I one whom I would callMore willingly my friend”

“Oh,lift me as a wave,a leaf,a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life!I bleed!”

“No more alone through the world's wilderness,Although I trod the paths of high intent,I journeyed now: no more companionless”

“I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.”

“Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - He hath awakened from the dream of life”

“The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments---Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!”

“Whether that lady's gentle mind, No longer with the form combinedWhich scattered love, as stars do light, Found sadness where it left delight,I dare not guess; but in this lifeOf error, ignorance, and strife,Where nothing is, but all things seem,And we the shadows of the dream,It is a modest creed, and yetPleasant if one considers it,To own that death itself must be,Like all the rest, a mockery.That garden sweet, that lady fair,And all sweet shapes and odors there,In truth have never passed away:'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death or change: their mightExceeds our organs, which endureNo light, being themselves obscure.(--Conclusion, Autumn - A Dirge)”

“I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.”

“Love, hope, and self-esteem, like clouds departAnd come, for some uncertain moments lent.Man were immortal and omnipotent,Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.”

“Love withers under constraints. Its very essence is liberty; it is comparable neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries are in confidence, equality and unreserve.”

“At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God’s own heart?”

“Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.”

“A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.”

“You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circle less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights.”

“In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.”

“Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.”

“Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror!”

“a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought”

“The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.”

“Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.”

“it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet”

“Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true”

“Podróżnik, wracający z starożytnej ziemi,Rzekł do mnie: „Nóg olbrzymich z głazu dwoje sterczyWśród puszczy bez tułowia. W pobliżu za niemiTonie w piasku strzaskana twarz. Jej wzrok szyderczy,Zacięte usta, wyraz zimnego rozkazuŚwiadczą, iż rzeźbiarz dobrze na tej bryle głazuOdtworzył skryte żądze, co, choć w poniewierce,Przetrwały rękę mistrza i mocarza serce.A na podstawie napis dochował się cało:«Ja jestem Ozymandias, król królów. Mocarze!Patrzcie na moje dzieła i przed moją chwałąGińcie z rozpaczy!» Więcej nic już nie zostało...Gdzie stąpić, gruz bezkształtny oczom się ukażeI piaski bielejące w pustyni obszarze.”

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

“Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,Are heaped for the beloved's bed;And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,Love itself shall slumber on.”

“(Title: To the Moon)Art thou pale for wearinessOf climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,Wandering companionlessAmong the stars that have a different birth,--And ever-changing, like a joyless eyeThat finds no object worth its constancy?”

“What objects are the fountainsOf thy happy strain?What fields, or waves, or mountains?What shapes of sky or plain?What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?”

“Sounds of vernal showersOn the twinkling grass,Rain awaken'd flowers,All that ever wasJoyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass”

“One word is too often profanedFor me to profane it,One feeling too falsely disdain'dFor thee to disdain it.One hope too like dispairFor prudence to smother,I can give not what men call love:But wilt thou accept notThe worship the heart lifts aboveAnd heaven rejects not:The desire of the moth for the star,The devotion of something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow?”

“The everlasting universe of thingsFlows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--Now lending splendour, where from secret springsThe source of human thought its tribute brings.”

“We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!”

“There was a Being whom my spirit oftMet on its visioned wanderings far aloft.A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman....”

“Perhaps the only comfort which remainsIs the unheeded clanking of my chains,The which I make, and call it melody.”

“To hope until hope creates from its very own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

“I have sent books and music there, and all / Those instruments with which high spirits call / The future from its cradle, and the past / Out of its grave, and make the present last / In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, / Folded within their own eternity.”

“There is eloquence in the tonguelesswind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of thereeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to somethingwithin the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathlessrapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, likethe enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one belovedsinging to you alone.”

“O weep for Adonis - He is dead." "Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep - he hath wakened from the dream of life”

“Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.”

“All love is sweet, given or received...”

“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 hostOf syllabubs and jellies and mincepies,And other such ladylike luxuries.”

“The splendors of the firmament of timeMay be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;Like stars to their appointed height they climbAnd death is a low mist which cannot blotThe brightness it may veil.”

“Familiar acts are beautiful through love.”

“Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race; they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass”