Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poet

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a key Romantic poet known for his radical ideas on love, freedom, and social justice, particularly in works like 'Prometheus Unbound'.

Men Love Life Dream Sweet Mind
Born
August 4, 1792
Died
July 8, 1822
Quotes
437
Rank
#64

Quote collection

Percy Bysshe Shelley quotes (page 10 of 22)

437 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

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"Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope?"

Beauty Dream Art
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"Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore, Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable sea?"

Ocean Years Sea
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"If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, what doubts should we have concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?"

Wise Prayer Doubt
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"Fame, power, and gold, are loved for their own sakes - are worshipped with a blind, habitual idolatry."

Gold Sake Blind
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"You ought to love all mankind; nay, every individual of mankind. You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circles less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights."

Life Rights Circles
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"Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal."

Death Dust Burning
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"No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time."

Mistake Novelty Moral
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"It is not a merit to tolerate, but rather a crime to be intolerant."

Tolerance Merit Crime
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"O heart, and mind, and thoughts! what thing do you Hope to inherit in the grave below?"

Heart Mind Graves
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"There is no real wealth but the labour of man. Were the mountains of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race."

Real Work Race
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"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. . . ."

Lying Flower Years
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"Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief."

Men Belief Involuntary
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"Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery."

Kings Power Dust
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"The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow."

Stars Night Sorrow
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"Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone. But grief returns with the revolving year."

Grief Winter Woe Is Me
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"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."

Beauty Forever Secret
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"At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God's own heart?"

Atheist Kings Believe
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