Quotes

Quotes

Quotes to inspire and reflect

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

A Defence of Poetry (written 1821)

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,

Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory—

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,

Spirit of Delight!

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Men of England, wherefore plough

For the lords who lay ye low?

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

How wonderful is Death,

Death and his brother Sleep!

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew.

‘The Sensitive Plant’ (1820) pt. 1, l. 1

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

Which is the measure of the universe.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ere Babylon was dust,

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hell is a city much like London.

‘Peter Bell the Third’ (1819) pt. 3, st. 1

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

‘Ozymandias’ (1819)

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819) l. 70

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.

‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819) l. 57

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819) l. 14

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nought may endure but Mutability.

‘Mutability’ (1816)

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met Murder on the way—

He had a mask like Castlereagh—

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

When the lamp is shattered

The light in the dust lies dead—

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong:

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats though unseen among us.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!

‘Julian and Maddalo’ (1818) l. 57

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I never was attached to that great sect,

Whose doctrine is that each one should select

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The world’s great age begins anew,

The golden years return.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,

And the nursling of the Sky.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

That orbèd maiden, with white fire laden,

Whom mortals call the Moon.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

A widow bird sat mourning for her love

Upon a wintry bough.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

He is a portion of the loveliness

Which once he made more lovely.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

From the contagion of the world’s slow stain

He is secure.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

He has out-soared the shadow of our night.

Adonais (1821) st. 40

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

A pardlike Spirit, beautiful and swift.

Adonais (1821) st. 32

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Winter is come and gone,

But grief returns with the revolving year.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Alas! that all we loved of him should be,

But for our grief, as if it had not been,

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I weep for Adonais—he is dead!

Adonais (1821) st. 1

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.

Adonais (1821) preface

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George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw

[Dancing is] a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

in New Statesman 23 March 1962

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George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw

England and America are two countries divided by a common language.

attributed in this and other forms to George Bernard Shaw, but not found in Shaw’s published writings; see Wilde 358:2

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