Percy Bysshe Shelley quotes - page 12

I wish no living thing to suffer pain. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
(Title: To the Moon) Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth,-- And ever-changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy? View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
If we reason, we would be understood if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another s if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past; there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been! Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm, to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
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 burthen of the curse of Babel. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow claspest the limits of mortality. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Virtue owns a more eternal foe Than Force or Fraud old Custom, legal Crime, And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
All things are sold the very light of heaven is venal earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal. Large codes of fraud and woe not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poet's food is love and fame. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope? View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley