Shelley Quotes

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
― Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of

“When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

“Be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that it shall not.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

“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.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever
Should come near.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Skylark and Adonais - With Other Poems

“The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. The supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist, Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.”
― James Joyce

“And others came... Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veil'd Destinies,
Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp; the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers and terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem to sleep in one another's arms, and dream of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we read in their smiles, and call reality.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Epipsychidion

“The book was Shelley, and it opened at a passage that he had cherished greatly two years before, and marked as “very good.”

“I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.”
― E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

“Fame Shark is American Psycho meets Call It Sleep. A no-holds -barred saga of the extremes a human being can go to in his or her quest for attention. Young has the precocity and audacity of Shelley and the fearlessness of Philippe Petit.”
― Francis Levy, Seven Days in Rio

“He pushed a finger through the surface of the water to trace the outline of her mouth. Ethereal bits of flesh floated loosely about his knuckle and nail. Then, calmly, he pulled her body up out of the tub and into his arms. He placed his lips on hers, now as cold and dead as his own.”
― P.J. Parker, Fire on the Water: A Companion to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

“We—are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar;
Such difference without discord, as can make
Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake
As trembling leaves in a continuous air?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Epipsychidion

“I had never thought more that we were two halves of the same girl.”
― Heather Redmond, Death and the Sisters

“Be more of an artist, and “load every rift” of your subject with ore.”
― John Keats

“The boundaries between us had been breached for good, we gave a new meaning t the notion that man and wife were one flesh. You could track back this kind of alchemy in books: '...intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two.' This is Shelley translating Plato, who was putting words into the mouth of Aristophanes, who's the only defender of heterosexual sex in the Symposium, although he makes it sound perverse.”
― Lorna Sage, Bad Blood

“Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers from an unrequited attachment to things in general.”
― GK Chesterton

“Three common themes in poetry: life, death, union, and separation. P.B. Shelley speaks to us about the acceptance of death and the possibility of transcendent union. H. Heine goes further, through the negation of life and the transcendent union in death. Balzac, in the end, with a spirit of balance, speaks to us about the ambivalence between life and death. Personally, I hold the thesis that death is the negation of life itself; where one exists, the other cannot. Thus, nothingness cannot exist for the self, except in simulation. Death is always contemplated by the other, who, in contemplating its cold visage, is reminded of the possibility of their own end and becomes terrified. The ego is an immortal transcendence in projection and emptiness in itself. If I could encapsulate what I would like to express in a maxim, it would be: “Consciousness, in life, unites all that, in life, whether united or separated, will be entirely nullified by death.”
― Geverson Ampolini