Top 400 Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Featured in: Famous Quotes, Poetry Quotes, Legacy Quotes, Greatness Quotes, Powerful Quotes

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

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Featured in: Quotes About Hope, Romantic Quotes, Spring Quotes

3. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Strength, Changing the World Quotes, Poetry Quotes, Resistance Quotes, Victory Quotes

4. “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Featured in: Love Quotes, Desire Quotes, Romantic Quotes, I Love You Quotes for Her, Romance Quotes

5. “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Featured in: Sorrow Quotes, Quotes About Songs

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

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Featured in: Moving Forward Quotes

7. “The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

8. “Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

9. “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

10. “No more let life divide what death can join together.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

11. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Songs

12. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Nought may endure but Mutability.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

17. “We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

18. “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

19. “The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

20. “Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine, In one spirit meet and mingle-Why not I with thine?”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

21. “O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

22. “All love is sweet, given or received...”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

23. “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

24. “Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

25. “Can man be free if woman be a slave?”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

26. “Sometimes The Devil is a gentleman.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Featured in: History Quotes

28. “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.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

29. “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

30. “I love tranquil solitude.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

31. “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

32. “When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead – When the cloud is scattered The rainbow’s glory is shed...”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

33. “I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

34. “I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

35. “A lovely lady, garmented in light From her own beauty.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

36. “I fall upon the thorns of life...”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

37. “The soul’s joy lies in doing.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

38. “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

39. “I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

40. “A dream has power to poison sleep.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

41. “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

42. “He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

43. “Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

44. “To hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

45. “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.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

46. “But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

47. “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

48. “The cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose...”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

49. “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

50. “Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley