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

All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire is most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

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 Quote

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

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

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 Quote

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

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

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

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 Quote

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

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

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

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

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

The soul's joy lies in doing.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

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 Quote

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote