Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

As long as skies are blue, and fields are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.

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.

Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight! Wherefore hast thou left me now Many a day and night? Many a weary night and day 'Tis since thou are fled away.

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?

Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise! She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.

I am the eye with which the Universe / Beholds itself, and knows it is divine.

"Whatever may be his [man's] true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution (change and extinction). This is the character of all life and being - each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are contained. - "On Life

Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low?

It's temples and palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment pil'd to heaven.

With hue like that when some great painter dips His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven, Or music by the night-wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

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

And man ... no longer now He slays the lamb that looks him in the face, And horribly devours his mangled flesh.

The being called God...bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.