708 Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley

It belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race.

In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.

All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.

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

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

I love tranquil solitude,And such societyAs is quiet, wise, and good.Song

I can give not what men call love;But wilt thou accept notThe worship the heart lifts aboveAnd the heavens reject not:The desire of the moth for the star,Of the night for the morrow,The devotion to something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow?

Confound the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law.