110+ Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes On Nature, Death And Romantic

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet. He was a major figure in the Romantic Movement and is one of the greatest lyric poets in the English language. He wrote many famous poems such as Ozymandias, The Masque of Anarchy, and To a Skylark. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley on love, nature, death.

Top 10 Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

1. Sometimes The Devil is a gentleman.
2. The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
3. Through the sunset of hope, Like the shapes of a dream, What paradise islands of glory gleam!
4. Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
5. When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.
6. O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
7. Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.
8. And Spring arose on the garden fair, Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere; And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
9. Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs, - To the silent wilderness, Where the soul need not repress Its music.
10. 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 Image Quotes

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind? — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley Short Quotes

• Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
• Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.
• Let there be light! Said Liberty , And like sunrise from the sea, Athens arose!
• Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
• Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.
• History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
• Far clouds of feathery gold, Shaded with deepest purple, gleam Like islands on a dark blue sea.
• My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
• Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
• Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes About Love

The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me? — Percy Bysshe Shelley

See the mountains kiss high Heaven And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea - What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me? — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Familiar acts are beautiful through love. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Fate,Time,Occasion,Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal love. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Know ye what it is to be a child? It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

A husband and wife ought to continue united so long as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Age cannot Love destroy, But perfidy can blast the flower, Even when in most unwary hour It blooms in Fancy's bower. Age cannot Love destroy, But perfidy can rend the shrine In which its vermeil splendours shine. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Chameleons feed on light and air: Poets food is love and fame. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes About Nature

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

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 of the human race to misery. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

We live and move and think; but we are not the creators of our own origin and existence. We are not the arbiters of every motion of our own complicated nature; we are not the masters of our own imaginations and moods of mental being. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal. Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The advocates of literal interpretation have been the most efficacious enemies of those doctrines whose nature they profess to venerate. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes About Death

I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won — Percy Bysshe Shelley

He has outsoared the shadow of our night; envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again; from the contagion of the world's slow stain, he is secure. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

O cease! must hate and death return, Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the Year On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying. . . . — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The splendors of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; Like stars to their appointed height they climb And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mild is the slow necessity of death;The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp,Without a groan, almost without a fear,Resigned in peace to the necessity;Calm as a voyager to some distant land,And full of wonder, full of hope as he. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Worse than despair, Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes About Life

Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

I wish no living thing to suffer pain. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

He hath awakened from the dream of life. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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

Until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

When you can discover where the fresh colors of the faded flower abide, or the music of the broken lyre, seek life among the dead. Such are the anxious and fearful contemplations of the common observer, though the popular religion often prevents him from confessing them even to himself. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes About Hope

Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

First our pleasures die - and then our hopes, and then our fears - and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust - and we die too. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

What is Love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

O heart, and mind, and thoughts! what thing do you Hope to inherit in the grave below? — Percy Bysshe Shelley

By all that is sacred in our hope for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth to give a fair trial to the vegetable system! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

So is Hope Changed for Despair-one laid upon the shelf, We take the other. Under heaven's high cope Fortune is god-all you endure and do Depends on circumstance as much as you. — 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

To hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, -- but it returneth. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes About Food

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

There was no corn -- in the wide market-place all loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold; They weighed it in small scales -- and many a face was fixed in eager horror then; his gold the miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain. — 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

Poet's food is love and fame. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is true that the reluctance to abstain from animal food, in those who have been long accustomed to its stimulus, is so great in some persons of weak minds, as to be scarcely overcome; but this is far from bringing any argument in its favour — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley Famous Quotes And Sayings

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind? — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being. Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is impossible that had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number- Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you Ye are many-they are few. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? — Percy Bysshe Shelley

There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been! — 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

Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar? — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem. — 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

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

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen — Percy Bysshe Shelley

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. — 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

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The pale stars are gone! For the sun, their swift shepherd, To their folds them compelling, In the depths of the dawn, Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and the flee Beyond his blue dwelling, As fawns flee the leopard. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest, Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast, Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air, The soul of her beauty and love lay bare. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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 pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower -- and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river Sparkling, bursting, borne away. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

That orbed maiden, with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

There is a harmony In autumn, and a luster in its sky... — Percy Bysshe Shelley

I love tranquil solitude. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend, To cold oblivion. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. — 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

Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

A dream has power to poison sleep. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Peter was dull; he was at first Dull; - Oh, so dull - so very dull! Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed - Still with his dulness was he cursed - Dull -beyond all conception - dull. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

A lovely lady, garmented in light From her own beauty. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Let the blue sky overhead, The green earth on which ye tread, All that must eternal be Witness the solemnity. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep. We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free. Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sometimes it's better to put love into hugs than to put it into words. Soul meets soul on lovers' lips. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

True love in this differs from gold and clay, that to divide is not to take away. Love is like understanding, that grows bright, gazing on many truths. — 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

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

One nightingale in an interfluous wood Satiate the hungry dark with melody. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

February... Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth, It kissed the forehead of the Earth, And smiled upon the silent sea, And bade the frozen streams be free, And waked to music all their fountains, And breathed upon the frozen mountains. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

O'er Egypt's land of memory floods are level, And they are thine, O Nile! and well thou knowest The soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil, And fruits, and poisons spring where'er thou flowest. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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 inquiry. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of Misery, Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nought may endure but Mutability. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hell is a city much like London A populous and smoky city — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Life Lessons by Percy Bysshe Shelley

1. Percy Bysshe Shelley's life and works emphasize the power of imagination and creativity, encouraging us to think outside the box and express ourselves freely.
2. His poetry also speaks to the importance of standing up for what we believe in, even when it is unpopular or difficult.
3. Lastly, he reminds us of the beauty of nature, and the need to appreciate and protect it.