The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible.

Death is the veil which those who live call life;

They sleep, and it is lifted.

A husband and wife ought to continue so long united 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.

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness!

Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all

The wanton horrors of her bloody play;

Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,

Shunning the light, and owning not its name,

Compelled by its deformity to screen

With flimsy veil of justice and of right

Its unattractive lineaments that scare

All save the brood of ignorance; at once

The cause and the effect of tyranny;

Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile;

Dead to all love but of its abjectness;

With heart impassive by more noble powers

Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame;

Despising its own miserable being,

Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.

The world is weary of the past,

Oh, might it die or rest at last!

Swiftly walk over the western wave,

Spirit of Night!

Out of the misty eastern cave

Where, all the long and lone daylight,

Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,

Which make thee terrible and dear, —

Swift be thy flight!

The pale stars are gone!

For the sun, their swift shepherd,

To their folds them compelling,

In the depths of the dawn,

Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and the flee

Beyond his blue dwelling,

As fawns flee the leopard.

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.

Love, from its awful throne of patient power

In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour

Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,

And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs

And folds over the world its healing wings.

If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "Ode to the West Wind"

A thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Prometheus Unbound

Come near me! I do weave
A chain I cannot break--I am possest
With thoughts too swift and strong for one lone human breast.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Revolt of Islam

Strange thoughts beget strange deeds.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, The Cenci

With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, The Revolt of Islam

All of us who are worth anything spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

You are now

In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow

At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore

Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.

Yet in its depth what treasures!

Lightning my pilot sits;

In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,

It struggles and howls at fits;

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,

This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move

In the depths of the purple sea;

Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,

Over the lakes and the plains,

Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream

The Spirit he loves remains;

And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile,

Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

Silence! Oh, well are Death and Sleep and Thou
Three brethren named, the guardians gloomy-winged,
Of one abyss, where life and truth and joy
Are swallowed up.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, fragment, Notebook 6

Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, To Jane, The Keen Stars were Twinkling

O Spring, of hope and love and youth and gladness
Wind-wingèd emblem! brightest, best and fairest!
Whence comest thou, when, with dark Winter's sadness
The tears that fade in sunny smiles thou sharest?
Sister of joy! thou art the child who wearest
Thy mother's dying smile, tender and sweet;
Thy mother Autumn, for whose grave thou bearest
Fresh flowers, and beams like flowers, with gentle feet,
Disturbing not the leaves which are her winding sheet.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, The Revolt of Islam

It is better that we gain what we demand by a process of negotiation which would occupy twenty years, than that by communicating a sudden shock to the interests of those who are the depositaries and dependents of power we should incur the calamity which their revenge might inflict upon us by giving the signal of ... war.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Complete Works

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, The Cloud

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni"

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