Percy Bysshe Shelley, (1792-1822) English Poet Quotes

All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire us most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still.

Death is the veil which those who live call life. They sleep, and it is lifted.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief becomes despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.