Top 400 Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

152. “For there are deeds which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

153. “O! I burn with impatience for the moment of the dissolution of intolerance; it has injured me.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

154. “Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

155. “Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

156. “This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

157. “All love is sweet Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

158. “He has outsoared the shadow of our night; envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again; from the contagion of the world’s slow stain, he is secure.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

159. “Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

160. “Sing again, with your dear voice revealing. A tone Of some world far from ours, where music and moonlight and feeling are one.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

161. “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

162. “The breath Of accusation kills an innocent name, And leaves for lame acquittal the poor life, Which is a mask without it.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

163. “For love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

164. “But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity; Her citizens, imperial spirits, Rule the present from the past, On all this world of men inherits Their seal is set.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

165. “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

166. “Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, – a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field...”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

167. “What is Freedom? ye can tell That which slavery is, too well For its very name has grown To an echo of your own.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

168. “War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, the lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

169. “Worse than despair, Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

170. “He hath awakened from the dream of life.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

171. “As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

172. “Till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

173. “Titles are tinsel, power a corrupter, glorya bubble, and excessive wealth a libel on its possessor.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

174. “I love Love – though he has wings, And like light can flee, But above all other things, Spirit, I love thee – Thou art love and life! Oh come, Make once more my heart thy home.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

175. “Through the sunset of hope, Like the shapes of a dream, What paradise islands of glory gleam!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

176. “Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

177. “Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

178. “I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

179. “Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden, That apparition, sole of men, he saw.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

180. “If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

181. “A sensitive plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan like leaves to the light, and closed them beneath the kisses of night.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

182. “Let me set my mournful ditty To a merry measure; Thou wilt never come for pity, Thou wilt come for pleasure; Pity then will cut away Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

183. “Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the heights of love’s rare universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire – I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

184. “Love, from its awful throne of patient power In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs And folds over the world its healing wings.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

185. “Gold is a living god and rules in scorn, All earthly things but virtue.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

186. “January gray is here, like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier, march with grief doth howl and rave, and April weeps – but, O ye hours! Follow with May’s fairest flowers.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

187. “I love tranquil solitude, And such society As is quiet, wise, and good; Between thee and me What difference? but thou dost possess The things I seek, not love them less.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

188. “The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

189. “Narrow The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, The life that wears, the spirit that creates One object, and one form, and builds thereby A sepulchre for its eternity.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

190. “When merciless ambition, or mad zeal, has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield, That, blind, they there may dig each other’s graves, And call the sad work glory...”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

191. “A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

192. “His fine wit Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

193. “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

194. “My father Time is weak and gray With waiting for a better day; See how idiot-like he stands, Fumbling with his palsied hands!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

195. “All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

196. “Venice, it’s temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

197. “Know ye what it is to be a child? It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

198. “One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

199. “Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

200. “Joy, once lost, is pain.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley