Percy Bysshe Shelley: Trending quotes (page 5)

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“No man has a right to disturb the public peace, by personally resisting the execution of a law however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason, to promote its repeal.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Article 9
"Declaration of Rights" http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/declarat.html (1812)

Peace , Law , Time , Personality

“Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,
Two scorpions under one wet stone,
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,
Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,
Two vipers tangled into one.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819 http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/percy_bysshe/s54cp/section163.html (Published 1832), st. 4

“The lone couch of his everlasting sleep.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), line 57

Sleep

“Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Notes
Queen Mab (1813)

Love

“A lovely lady, garmented in light
From her own beauty.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Witch of Atlas http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4696 (1820), st. 5

Love , Beauty , Light

“Me — who am as a nerve o'er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth,
And was to thee the flame upon thy hearth,
When all beside was cold: — that thou on me
Shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Source: Julian and Maddalo http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel115.html (1819), l. 449

“The natural philosopher, in addition to the sensations common to all men inspired by the event of death, believes that he sees with more certainty that it is attended with the annihilation of sentiment and thought. He observes the mental powers increase and fade with those of the body, and even accommodate themselves to the most transitory changes of our physical nature. Sleep suspends many of the faculties of the vital and intellectual principle; drunkenness and disease will either temporarily or permanently derange them. Madness or idiotcy may utterly extinguish the most excellent and delicate of those powers. In old age the mind gradually withers; and as it grew and was strengthened with the body, so does it together with the body sink into decrepitude. Assuredly these are convincing evidences that so soon as the organs of the body are subjected to the laws of inanimate matter, sensation, and perception, and apprehension are at an end.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Death , Men , Age , Disease

“A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift —
A Love in desolation masked; — a Power
Girt round with weakness; — it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour;
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow; — even whilst we speak
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XXXII
Adonais (1821)

Love , Life , Smile , Beauty

“Heaven's ebon vault,
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto IV
Queen Mab (1813)

Love , World , Star , Sleep

“It is probable that what we call thought is not an actual being, but no more than the relation between certain parts of that infinitely varied mass, of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceases to exist as soon as those parts change their position with regard to each other.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Universe , Change , Parting

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

“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

Not Shelley but the I Ching
Misattributed

Men , Sadness , Peace , Departure

“Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

To Jane. The keen Stars were twinkling; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

World , Music , Feeling , Singing

“Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, — that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mont Blanc http://www.readprint.com/work-1366/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1816), st. 3

Death , World , Soul , Business

“… they who wore
Mitres and helms and crowns, or wreaths of light,
Signs of thought's empire over thought —their lore
Taught them not this, to know themselves; their might
Could not repress the mystery within.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Triumph of Life (1822)

Light

“On a poet's lips I slept
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Fourth Spirit, Act I, l. 737
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Love , Dreams

“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 creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change nor falter nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Demogorgon, Act IV, closing lines
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Love , Life , Death , Beauty