Shelley, Percy Bysshe
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Shelley, Percy Bysshe
The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Dress
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Chastity
Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, -- but it returneth.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Change
Man who man would be, must rule the empire of himself.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Empire
Man s yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Change
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Economy and Economics
If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another s; if we feel, we would that another s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart s best blood. This is Love.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Compatibility
Here I swear, and as I break my oath may 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.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Christians and Christianity
There was no corn -- in the wide market-place all loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold; They weighed it in small scales -- and many a face was fixed in eager horror then; his gold the miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Famine
The gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Future
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.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Government
Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Fidelity
Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Generosity
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Familiarity
The soul s joy lies in doing.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Happiness
Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Forgiveness
The Galilean is not a favorite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favor, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Jesus Christ
All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire is most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Love
To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Leaders and Leadership
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.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Love
There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Labor
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Imagination
Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Hope
Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Nature
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Music
All things are sold: the very light of heaven is venal; earth s unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Money
Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life... is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Obscenity
Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Power
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Tragedies
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Poetry and Poets
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Poetry and Poets
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.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Mountains
The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Studying
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.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Seasons
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...
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Tyranny
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Revenge
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Theater
All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Self-improvement
It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower -- and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Translation
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Sorrow
I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Religion
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Goodness
Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Critics and Criticism
There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Autumn
How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Death and Dying
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.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Argument
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.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Death and Dying
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Death and Dying
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep -- he hath awakened from the dream of life -- Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Bereavement
It is impossible that had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Vegetarianism
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Wealth
O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Winter
War is the statesman s game, the priest s delight, The lawyer s jest, the hired assassin s trade.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
War