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Percy Bysshe Shelley: 492 quotes47 likes

“Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
The subject, not the citizen; for kings
And subjects, mutual foes, forever play
A losing game into each other's hands,
Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto III
Queen Mab (1813)

“Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley To a Skylark

St. 4
To a Skylark (1821)

“Love's very pain is sweet,
But its reward is in the world divine
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Source: Epipsychidion (1821), l. 595

“The life of Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward everlasting fame. These things are not the less poetry, quia carent vate sacro [because they lack a sacred bard]. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

This passage has sometimes been paraphrased as "History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man". <br class="br"> A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

“That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Cloud

The Cloud, iv; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“If it be proved that the world is ruled by a Divine Power, no inference necessarily can be drawn from that circumstance in favour of a future state.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

“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.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Cloud

St. 7
The Cloud (1820)

“Let us bring the question to the test of experience and fact; and ask ourselves, considering our nature in its entire extent, what light we derive from a sustained and comprehensive view of its component parts, which may enable us to assert with certainty that we do or do not live after death.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

“Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon —
Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night —
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley To Night

To Night (1821), st. 5

“A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew, have equal rights: they are men and brethren.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Article 24 <br class="br"> "Declaration of Rights" http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/declarat.html (1812)

“I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatch'd with me the envious night:
They know that never joy illum'd my brow
Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou, O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 6
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)

“But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial spirits,
Rule the present from the past,
On all this world of men inherits
Their seal is set.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Hellas

Source: Hellas (1821), l. 696-703

“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.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Demogorgon, Act IV, l. 562–569
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

“Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

“The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

One Word is Too Often Profaned (1821), st. 2

“One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

One Word is Too Often Profaned http://www.readprint.com/work-1370/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1821), st. 1

“The breath
Of accusation kills an innocent name,
And leaves for lame acquittal the poor life,
Which is a mask without it.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Cenci

The Cenci (1819)

“Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Source: Julian and Maddalo http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel115.html (1819), l. 543

“And bid them love each other and be blest:
And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves,
And come and be my guest, — for I am Love's.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Source: Epipsychidion (1821), l. 602

“Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes;
And yet I pity those they torture not.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Prometheus, Act I, l. 632
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)