Famous Quotes

Quotes by 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.
• 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.
• Death is the veil which those who live call life They sleep, and it is lifted.
• Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
• 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.
• History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
• In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
• Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
• 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.
• Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
• 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.
• Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
• Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
• Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
• Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
• Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
• Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
• Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
• Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
• Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
• Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
• The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
• Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.
• War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
• 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.