Percy Bysshe Shelley
Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.Collection: New Relationship
Strange thoughts beget strange deeds.Collection: Deeds
A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.Collection: Atheist
a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thoughtCollection: May
If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, what doubts should we have concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?Collection: Wise
There is no real wealth but the labour of man. Were the mountains of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race.Collection: Real
I love tranquil solitude.Collection: Solitude
Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.Collection: Heart
When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven.Collection: Joy
Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are.Collection: Wise
In fact, truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.Collection: Atheist
Joy, once lost, is painCollection: Pain
And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.Collection: Kings
Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.Collection: Friends
Peace is in the grave. The grave hides all things beautiful and good. I am a God and cannot find it there, Nor would I seek it; for, though dread revenge, This is defeat, fierce king, not victory.Collection: Beautiful
Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind.Collection: Wisdom
The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.Collection: Wise
God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.Collection: Ignorance
How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Country
A husband and wife ought to continue united so long as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.Collection: Husband
Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.Collection: Thinking
I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die.Collection: Daughter
[L]ike thee to those in sorrow, Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow To the rough year just awake In its cradle on the brake. The brightest hour of unborn Spring, Through the winter wandering, Found, it seems, the halcyon Morn To hoar February born.Collection: Sweet
In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun O'er which clouds are brightening, Thou dost float and run Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.Collection: Running
When you can discover where the fresh colors of the faded flower abide, or the music of the broken lyre, seek life among the dead. Such are the anxious and fearful contemplations of the common observer, though the popular religion often prevents him from confessing them even to himself.Collection: Flower
Peace is in the grave.Collection: Graves
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame Over his living head like heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow.Collection: Life
How beautiful is sunset when the glow Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!Collection: Beautiful
Till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!Collection: Fate
There are two Italies.... The one is the most sublime and lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man; the other is the most degraded, disgusting, and odious. What do you think? Young women of rank actually eat - you will never guess what - garlick! Our poor friend Lord Byron is quite corrupted by living among these people, and in fact, is going on in a way not worthy of him.Collection: Food
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?Collection: Atheist
I wish no living thing to suffer pain.Collection: Life
Deep truth is imageless.Collection: Truth
It is only by hearsay (by word of mouth passed down from generation to generation) that whole peoples adore the God of their fathers and of their priests: authority, confidence, submission and custom with them take the place of conviction or of proofs: they prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers taught them to prostrate themselves and pray: but why did their fathers fall on their knees?Collection: Father
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!Collection: Art
Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.Collection: Death
I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers.Collection: Life
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?Collection: Spring
I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields; Reflection, you may come to-morrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow. You with the unpaid bill, Despair, You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care, I will pay you in the grave, Death will listen to your stave.Collection: Sweet
The psychological and moral comfort of a presence at once humble and understanding-this is the greatest benefit that the dog has bestowed upon man.Collection: Friendship
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the Year On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying. . . .Collection: Lying
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.Collection: Forgiveness