Top 400 Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Chameleons feed on light and air: Poets food is love and fame.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

202. “Oh that simplicity and innocence its own unvalued work so seldom knows!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

203. “Heaven’s ebon vault Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon’s unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

204. “Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

205. “Far clouds of feathery gold, Shaded with deepest purple, gleam Like islands on a dark blue sea.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

206. “The moon of Mahomet Arose, and it shall set; While, blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon, The cross leads generations on.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

207. “The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

208. “The desire of the moth for the star.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

209. “The quick Dreams, The passion-winged Ministers of thought.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

210. “Sounds of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain awaken’d flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

211. “Less oft peace in Shelley’s mind, Than calm in waters seen.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

212. “Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

213. “Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

214. “When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

215. “Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

216. “Spirit, Patience, Gentleness, All that can adorn and bless Art thou let deeds, not words, express Thine exceeding loveliness.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

217. “Jesus Christ represented God as the principle of all good, the source of all happiness, the wise and benevolent Creator and Preserver of all living things. But the interpreters of his doctrines have confounded the good and the evil principle.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

218. “The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

219. “Be your strong and simple words Keen to wound as sharpened swords, And wide as targes let them be, With their shade to cover ye.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

220. “I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

221. “Mild is the slow necessity of death; The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp, Without a groan, almost without a fear, Resigned in peace to the necessity; Calm as a voyager to some distant land, And full of wonder, full of hope as he.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

222. “The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

223. “I am convinced that there can be no regeneration of mankind until laughter is put down.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

224. “The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

225. “One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

226. “Age cannot Love destroy, But perfidy can blast the flower, Even when in most unwary hour It blooms in Fancy’s bower. Age cannot Love destroy, But perfidy can rend the shrine In which its vermeil splendours shine.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

227. “For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not, the beautiful.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

228. “There is no real wealth but the labor of man.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

229. “I change, but I cannot die.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

230. “Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal. Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

231. “There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

232. “Strange thoughts beget strange deeds.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

233. “The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

234. “Whence are we, and why are we? Of what scene The actors or spectators?”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

235. “Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

236. “You are now In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. Yet in its depth what treasures!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

237. “It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

238. “The encomium of one incapable of flattery is indeed flattering.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

239. “The old laws of England they Whose reverend heads with age are gray, Children of a wiser day; And whose solemn voice must be Thine own echo Liberty!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

240. “God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

241. “Look on yonder earth: The golden harvests spring; the unfailing sun Sheds light and life; the fruits, the flowers, the trees, Arise in due succession; all things speak Peace, harmony and love. The universe, In Nature’s silent eloquence, declares That all fulfil the works of love and joy, – All but the outcast, Man.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

242. “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

243. “I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

244. “I know The past and thence I will essay to glean A warning for the future, so that man May profit by his errors, and derive Experience from his folly; For, when the power of imparting joy Is equal to the will, the human soul Requires no other heaven.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

245. “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.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

246. “A husband and wife ought to continue united so long as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

247. “The pale stars are gone! For the sun, their swift shepherd, To their folds them compelling, In the depths of the dawn, Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and the flee Beyond his blue dwelling, As fawns flee the leopard.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

248. “I arise from dreams of thee, And a spirit in my feet Has led me- who knows how? To thy chamber-window, Sweet!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

249. “Just a tender sense of my own process, that holds something of my connection with the divine.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

250. “Familiar acts are beautiful through love.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley