Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.”

“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

“There was a Being whom my spirit oftMet on its visioned wanderings far aloft.A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman....”

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

“And in a mad tranceStrike with our spirit's knifeInvulnerable nothingsWe decayLike corpses in a charnelFear & GriefConvulse is & consume usDay by dayAnd cold hopes swarmLike worms withinOur living clay”

“God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.”

“Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.”

“At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God’s own heart?”

“You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circle less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights.”

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”

“God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.”

“Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.”

“The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:”

“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”

“When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.”

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

“Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.”

“...Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs— To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another’s mind. While the touch of Nature’s art Harmonizes heart to heart. I leave this notice on my door For each accustomed visitor:— “I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields;...Awake! arise! And come away! To the wild woods and the plains, And the pools where winter rains Image all their roof of leaves, Where the pine its garland weaves Of sapless green, and ivy dun Round stems that never kiss the sun: Where the lawns and pastures be, And the sandhills of the sea:— Where the melting hoar-frost wets The daisy-star that never sets, And wind-flowers, and violets, Which yet join not scent to hue, Crown the pale year weak and new; When the night is left behind In the deep east, dun and blind, And the blue noon is over us, And the multitudinous Billows murmur at our feet, Where the earth and ocean meet, And all things seem only one In the universal sun.”

“There is no real wealth but the labor of man.”

“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.”