Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity

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

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.

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?

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.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever
Should come near.

Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life.

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

All love is sweet, given or received...

When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead — When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is shed. When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

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

Here I swear, and as I break my oath may Infinity Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge... Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again — I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.

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