Percy Bysshe Shelley – 25 Quotes

25 Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Death is the veil which those who live call life They sleep, and it is lifted.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Government is an evil it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

We look before and after, And pine for what is not Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, the lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley