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Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes
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Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets, who is regarded by some as among the finest lyric and philosophical poets in the English language, and one of the most influential. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not see fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death. Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock and his own second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

Shelley is perhaps best known for classic poems such as "Ozymandias", "Ode to the West Wind", "To a Skylark", "Music, When Soft Voices Die", "The Cloud" and The Masque of Anarchy. His other major works include a groundbreaking verse drama, The Cenci , and long, visionary, philosophical poems such as Queen Mab , Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Adonais, Prometheus Unbound – widely considered to be his masterpiece, Hellas: A Lyrical Drama and his final, unfinished work, The Triumph of Life .

Shelley's close circle of friends included some of the most important progressive thinkers of the day, including his father-in-law, the philosopher William Godwin, and Leigh Hunt. Though Shelley's poetry and prose output remained steady throughout his life, most publishers and journals declined to publish his work for fear of being arrested for either blasphemy or sedition. Shelley's poetry sometimes had only an underground readership during his day, but his poetic achievements are widely recognized today, and his political and social thought had an impact on the Chartist and other movements in England, and reach down to the present day. Shelley's theories of economics and morality, for example, had a profound influence on Karl Marx; his early – perhaps first – writings on nonviolent resistance influenced Leo Tolstoy, whose writings on the subject in turn influenced Mahatma Gandhi, and through him Martin Luther King Jr. and others practicing nonviolence during the American civil rights movement.

Shelley became a lodestar to the subsequent three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was admired by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, W. B. Yeats, Upton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan. Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience was apparently influenced by Shelley's writings and theories on nonviolence in protest and political action. Shelley's popularity and influence has continued to grow in contemporary poetry circles. Wikipedia  

✵ 4. August 1792 – 8. July 1822
Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Percy Bysshe Shelley: 246   quotes 46   likes

Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Men

“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)

Wisdom

“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)

Imagination

“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

Star , Night

“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

Feeling , Falseness

“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)

Life

“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

Men , Suffering , Learning

“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

Love

“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)

“Kings are like stars — they rise and set, they have
The worship of the world, but no repose.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Hellas

Source: Hellas (1821), l. 195

World , Star

“Sweet the rose which lives in Heaven,
Although on earth ’tis planted,
Where its honours blow,
While by earth’s slaves the leaves are riven
Which die the while they glow.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Untitled (1810); titled "Love's Rose" by William Michael Rossetti in Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1870)

“Let me set my mournful ditty
To a merry measure;
Thou wilt never come for pity,
Thou wilt come for pleasure;
Pity then will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 4
Song: Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley/17889 (1821)

Pleasure

“All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Demogorgon, Act II, sc. iv, l. 110
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Evil

“Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness!
Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all
The wanton horrors of her bloody play;
Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,
Shunning the light, and owning not its name,
Compelled by its deformity to screen
With flimsy veil of justice and of right
Its unattractive lineaments that scare
All save the brood of ignorance; at once
The cause and the effect of tyranny;
Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile;
Dead to all love but of its abjectness;
With heart impassive by more noble powers
Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame;
Despising its own miserable being,
Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto V
Queen Mab (1813)

Love , Pleasure , Fear , Religion

“Here I swear, and as I break my oath may Infinity Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge… Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again — I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg (3 January 1811)

Feeling , Forgiveness , Hell , Revenge

“The spirit of the nation that should take the lead in this great reform would insensibly become agricultural: commerce, with all its vice, selfishness, and corruption, would gradually decline; more natural habits would produce gentler manners, and the excessive complication of political relations would be so far simplified that every individual might feel and understand why he loved his country, and took a personal interest in its welfare.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book A Vindication of Natural Diet

A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)

Love , Feeling , Understanding , Nature

“Teas,
Where small talk dies in agonies.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Peter Bell the Third (1819), Pt. III, st. 12

Tea

“Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book Ode to the West Wind

St. II
Ode to the West Wind (1819)

Night

“If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Article 25
"Declaration of Rights" http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/declarat.html (1812)

Love , Idea , Birth , Chance

“And others came… Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendours, and GloOms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp; — the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XIII
Adonais (1821)

Pleasure , Fear , Family , Smile

“Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Spirit of the Hour, Act III, sc. iv, l. 200
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Death , Star , Chance

“Alas! that all we loved of him should be,
But for our grief, as if it had not been,
And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
The actors or spectators?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XXI
Adonais (1821)

Love

“There is no God!
This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book The Necessity of Atheism

The Necessity of Atheism (1811)

God , Universe

“We must prove design before we can infer a designer.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book The Necessity of Atheism

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/shly310.txt
Alternate: Design must be proved before a designer can be inferred. http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/shelleydeism.htm
The Necessity of Atheism (1811)

“Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book Ode to the West Wind

St. III
Ode to the West Wind (1819)

Dreams , Flowers , Sense , Sleep

“Peace is in the grave.
The grave hides all things beautiful and good.
I am a God and cannot find it there,
Nor would I seek it; for, though dread revenge,
This is defeat, fierce king, not victory.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Prometheus, Act I, l. 638
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

God , Peace , Beauty , Revenge

“Rough wind, the moanest loud
Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all the night long;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main, —
Wail, for the world's wrong!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Dirge http://poetryarchive.bravepages.com/RSTU_poets/shelley_percy.b.htm#dirge (1821)

World , Sadness , Tear , Night

“Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
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.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples http://www.readprint.com/work-1373/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1818), st. 5

Life , Death , Lie , Feeling

“A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light.
And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Sensitive Plant http://www.kalliope.org/digt.pl?longdid=shelley2003060601 (1820), Pt. I, st. 1

Kiss , Light , Night

“And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 12
(1819)

Wine

“The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XXX
Adonais (1821)

“Poor captive bird! Who, from thy narrow cage,
Pourest such music, that it might assuage
The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee,
Were they not deaf to all sweet melody.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Source: Epipsychidion (1821), l. 9

Music , Bird , Heart

“I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Source: Julian and Maddalo http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel115.html (1819), l. 14

Love , Pleasure , Soul

“Let there be light! said Liberty,
And like sunrise from the sea,
Athens arose!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Hellas

Source: Hellas (1821), l. 682

Light , Sea

“He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Fourth Spirit, Act I, l. 742
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Bee , Sun

“From the great morning of the world when first
God dawned on Chaos.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XIX
Adonais (1821)

God , World

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley book Ode to the West Wind

St. IV
Ode to the West Wind (1819)

Life

“I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
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.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Cloud

St. 1
The Cloud (1820)

Dreams , Flowers , Light , Sun

“A wild dissolving bliss
Over my frame he breathed, approaching near,
And bent his eyes of kindling tenderness
Near mine, and on my lips impressed a lingering kiss.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Revolt of Islam

Canto I, st. 42
The Revolt of Islam (1817)

Kiss

“Mind from its object differs most in this:
Evil from good; misery from happiness;
The baser from the nobler; the impure
And frail, from what is clear and must endure.
If you divide suffering and dross, you may
Diminish till it is consumed away;
If you divide pleasure and love and thought,
Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared:
This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw
The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law
By which those live, to whom this world of life
Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife
Tills for the promise of a later birth
The wilderness of this Elysian earth.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Source: Epipsychidion (1821), l. 174

Love , Life , Pleasure , Truth

“You lie—under a mistake,
For this is the most civil sort of lie
That can be given to a man's face. I now
Say what I think.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Translation of Calderon's Magico Prodigioso, Scene i; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Lie , Thinking

“The dust of creeds outworn.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

First Spirit, Act I, l. 697
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

“The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. LV
Adonais (1821)

Soul , Star

“Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 79
(1819)

War

“This is the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born’s spell yawns for Heaven’s despotism
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Demogorgon, Act IV, l. 554–561
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Love , World , Spring , Heart

“All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 3
(1819)

Heart

“Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley To a Skylark

St. 3
To a Skylark (1821)

Joy

“My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who fitly shalt conceive thy reasoning,
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;
Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring
Thee to base company (as chance may do),
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain,
I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again,
My last delight! tell them that they are dull,
And bid them own that thou art beautiful.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Dedication
Epipsychidion (1821)

Fear , Beauty , Art , Chance

“Till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. I
Adonais (1821)

Fate , Light , Past , Future

“Should ever a physician be born with the genius of Locke, I am persuaded that he might trace all bodily and mental derangements to our unnatural habits, as clearly as that philosopher has traced all knowledge to sensation.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book A Vindication of Natural Diet

A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)

Knowledge