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.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
First our pleasures die - and then our hopes, and then our fears - and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust - and we die too.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
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.
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.
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.
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.
All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.
Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
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!
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
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.
The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.
Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
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.
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
The soul's joy lies in doing.
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.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
