Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much.

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Tags : Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes , Ignorance Quotes , Thinking Quotes

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.

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The advocates of literal interpretation have been the most efficacious enemies of those doctrines whose nature they profess to venerate.

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Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.

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The breath Of accusation kills an innocent name, And leaves for lame acquittal the poor life, Which is a mask without it.

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Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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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.

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Tags : Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes , Wise Quotes , Wisdom Quotes

I am not much of a hand at love songs, you see I mingle metaphysics with even this, but perhaps in this age of Philosophy that may be excused.

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What is Freedom? ye can tell That which slavery is, too well For its very name has grown To an echo of your own.

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Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

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O heart, and mind, and thoughts! what thing do you Hope to inherit in the grave below?

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a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought

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The flood of time is rolling on; We stand upon its brink, whilst they are gone To glide in peace down death's mysterious stream. Have ye done well?

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Tags : Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes , Time Quotes , Rolling Quotes

Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.

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The quick Dreams, The passion-winged Ministers of thought.

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Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.

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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.

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My father Time is weak and gray With waiting for a better day; See how idiot-like he stands, Fumbling with his palsied hands!

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Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, These are the seals of that most firm assurance Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength; And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length; These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o'er the disentangled doom.

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Tags : Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes , Mother Quotes , Hands Quotes

Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro’ the spirit’s gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.

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Tags : Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes , Revenge Quotes , Regret Quotes