Percy Bysshe Shelley

“You are nowIn London, that great sea, whose ebb and flowAt once is deaf and loud, and on the shoreVomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.Yet in its depth what treasures!”

“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds”

“Chameleons feed on light and air: Poets food is love and fame.”

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”

“Music, When Soft Voices DieMusic, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.”

“Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.”

“By solemn vision and bright silver dreamHis infancy was nurtured. Every sightAnd sound from the vast earth and ambient airSent to his heart its choicest impulses.”

“I'm...like a poet hiddenIn the light of thought Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”

“I am the daughter of Earth and Water,And the nursling of the Sky;I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;I change, but I cannot die.For after the rain when with never a stainThe pavilion of Heaven is bare,And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleamsBuild 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.”

“Men of England, heirs of Glory,Heroes of unwritten story,Nurslings of one mighty Mother,Hopes of her, and one another;Rise like Lions after slumberIn unvanquishable number,Shake your chains to earth like dewWhich in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many — they are few”

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

“Nothing in the world is single;All things by a law divineIn one spirit meet and mingle.Why not I with thine?”

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

“The fountains mingle with the river,And the rivers with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix forever,With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single;All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle:— Why not I with thine? See! the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea:— What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?”

“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;To love, and bear; to hope till Hope createsFrom it's own wreck the thing it contemplates;Neither to change, not falter, nor repent;This, like thy glory, Titan, is to beGood, great and joyous,beautiful and free;This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory”

“That orbèd maiden, with white fire laden,Whom mortals call the moon,Glides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floorBy the midnight breezes strewn.”

“The indignity of your fate is the will of one more powerful.”

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

“What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much.”

“All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.”

“The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.”

“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”

“Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro’ the spirit’s gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.”

“We look before and after,And pine for what is not;Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.”

“Poet's food is love and fame.”

“Joy, once lost, is pain”

“Fear not for the future, weep not for the past”

“He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind;Through desert woods and tracts, which seemLike ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.”

“For love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change.”

“The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.”

“And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“The being called God...bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.”

“God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.”

“If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, what doubts should we have concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?”

“Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.”

“The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?”

“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.”

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

“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 ”

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”

“I arise from dreams of thee,And a spirit in my feetHas led me- who knows how?To thy chamber-window, Sweet!”

“When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.”

“I met Murder on the way -He had a mask like Castlereagh”

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance”

“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.”

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

“Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.”

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

“Whatever may be his [man's] true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution (change and extinction). This is the character of all life and being - each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are contained. - "On Life”

“Ozymandias"I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frownAnd wrinkled lip and sneer of cold commandTell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.And on the pedestal these words appear:'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,The lone and level sands stretch far away.”