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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

“All love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God;
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Asia, Act II, sc. v, l. 39
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Love , God , Feeling , Light

“Those who inflict must suffer, for they see
The work of their own hearts, and this must be
Our chastisement or recompense.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Source: Julian and Maddalo http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel115.html (1819), l. 482

Suffering , Heart

“There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried. Debility is gradually converted into strength, disease into healthfulness: madness, in all its hideous variety, from the ravings of the fettered maniac, to the unaccountable irrationalities of ill-temper, that make a hell of domestic life, into a calm and considerable evenness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge of the future moral reformation of society.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book A Vindication of Natural Diet

A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)

Life , Health , Disease , Hell

“Let the blue sky overhead,
The green earth on which ye tread,
All that must eternal be
Witness the solemnity.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 66
(1819)

“Spirit, Patience, Gentleness,
All that can adorn and bless
Art thou — let deeds, not words, express
Thine exceeding loveliness.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 64
(1819)

Art , Patience

“The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Fury, Act I, l. 625–631
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Love , Wisdom , Men , Tear

“… why God made irreconcilable
Good and the means of good.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Triumph of Life (1822)

God

“My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 23
(1819)

Time , Waiting

“Have you not heard
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,
His best friends hear no more of him?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820), l. 235

“I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Indian Serenade http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/the_indian_serenade.html (1819), st. 1

Dreams , Star , Sleep , Night

“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

World , Feeling , Understanding , Singing

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

World , Beauty

“What is Freedom? — ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well —
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 39
(1819)

Freedom

“Peter was dull; he was at first
Dull,—oh so dull, so very dull!
Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed,
Still with this dulness was he cursed!
Dull,—beyond all conception, dull.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Peter Bell the Third (1819), Pt. VII, st. 11

“Cease, cease, wayward Mortal! I dare not unveil
The shadows that float o’er Eternity’s vale;
Nought waits for the good but a spirit of Love,
That will hail their blest advent to regions above.
For Love, Mortal, gleams through the gloom of my sway,
And the shades which surround me fly fast at its ray.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Death (Shelley, 2)

"Death" in an untitled dialogue (1809); published in Life of Shelley (1858) by Thomas Jefferson Hogg, p. 197

Love , Waiting , Flying

“Not the swart Pariah in some Indian grove,
Lone, lean, and hunted by his brother’s hate,
Hath drunk so deep the cup of bitter fate
As that poor wretch who cannot, cannot love:
He bears a load which nothing can remove,
A killing, withering weight.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The Solitary" (1810), st. 2

Love , Hate , Fate

“I am gone into the fields
To take what this sweet hour yields; —
Reflection, you may come to-morrow,
Sit by the fireside with Sorrow. —
You with the unpaid bill, Despair, —
You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care, —
I will pay you in the grave, —
Death will listen to your stave.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Source: To Jane: The Invitation (1822), l. 31

Death , Despair

“Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Earth, Act I, l. 191
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Men , Dead

“Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Notes
Queen Mab (1813)

Nature , Happiness

“He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XLII
Adonais (1821)

Music , Nature , Bird , Night

“The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Hellas

Final chorus
Hellas (1821)

World , Past

“In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man’s estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Fury, Act I, l. 618–624
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Fear , Thinking , Heart

“The word of God has fenced about all crimes with Holiness.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley. Queen Mab https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Queen_Mab/Canto_VII

God

“What is Freedom?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Masque of Anarchy

ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well —
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
St. 39
The Masque of Anarchy (1819)

Freedom

“Then, what is Life?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Triumph of Life (1822)

Life