Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Familiar acts are beautiful through love.”

“O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

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

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

“Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.”

“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.”

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

“Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.”

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

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

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

“The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The soul's joy lies in doing.”

“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 ma...”

“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”

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