Tao Te Ching
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792 – 1822 CE
Another culture-transforming sage not recognized or appreciated during his lifetime, Shelley became regarded as one of the English language’s premier poets and transformers of political and social culture. A major influence on Thoreau's views on non-violent protest, political action, and his book, Civil Disobedience; he also inspired Karl Marx’s economic theories, Leo Tolstoy’s approach to non-violent resistance, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the world’s various Civil Rights Movements. During his 29-year life, most publishers became too afraid of being arrested to publish his work and his readership remained small and underground. From his tiny seed, however, our modern, humanistic culture sprouted.
Lineages
British Poets Romanticist
Eras
Western
Romantacism (1800 – 1850 CE)Chinese
Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE)Sources
Unlisted Sources
A Defence of Poetry (1821)
A Philosophical View of Reform, 1819
Alastor, the Spirit of Solitude
Hellas, 1821
Masque of Anarchy, 1819
Mont Blanc
Mutability
Notes on Queen Mab
Notes on Queen Mab, 1813
Political Greatness (1821)
The Triumph of Life
Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley (49 quotes)
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
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“A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth, at once the center and circumference of knowledge. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted... it awakens and enlarges the mind lifting the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”
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“We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.”
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“Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number—Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you—Ye are many—they are few.”
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“Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”
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“Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle:— Why not I with thine?”
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“Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs, -
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress
Its music.”
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“The ripening of reason regulates the imagination. This is the work of years, and the most important of all employments.”
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“Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendor, and the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth.”
from The Triumph of Life
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“Of people there was hurrying to and fro
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,
All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why”
from Triumph of Life
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“Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear
Some flying from the thing they feared and some
Seeking the object of another's fear.
”
from The Triumph of Life
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“Upon that path where flowers never grew
Others as with steps towards the tomb
And others mournfully within the gloom
Of their own shadow walked, and called it death
Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath.
”
from The Triumph of Life
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“Tortured by the agonizing pleasure,
Convulsed and on the rapid whirlwinds spun
Of that fierce spirit, whose unholy leisure
Was soothed by mischief since the world begun”
from The Triumph of Life
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“Like the young Moon
When on the sunlit limits of the night
Her white shell trembles amid crimson air
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might
Doth, as a herald of its coming, bear
”
from The Triumph of Life
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“Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea
From senate house and prison and theater
When Freedom left those who upon the free
Had bound a yoke which soon they stooped to bear.”
from Triumph of Life
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“All but the sacred few who could not tame
Their spirits to the Conqueror, but as soon
As they had touch the world with living flame
Fled back like eagles to their native noon.
”
from The Triumph of Life
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“If Bacon's spirit had not leapt
Like lightning out of darkness; he compelled
The Proteus shape of Nature's as it slept”
from The Triumph of Life
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“Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air…
Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair
Kindle invisibly; and as they glow
Like moths by light attracted and repelled,
Oft to new bright destruction come and go”
from Triumph of Life
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“Old men and women foully disarrayed
Shake their gray hair in the insulting wind.
Their work and to the dust whence they arose
And frost in these performs what fire in those.”
from Triumph of Life
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“I feared, loved, suffered did, and died…
If I have been extinguished, yet there arise
A thousand beacons from the spark I bore
The great, the unforgotten: they who wore
Signs of thought’s empire over thought; their lore”
from Triumph of Life
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“All what is mortal of great Plato there
And Life, where long that flower of Heaven grew not,
That star that ruled his doom was far too fair—
Or age or sloth or slavery could subdue not”
from Triumph of Life
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“Of Caesar’s crime from him to Constantine
And Gregory and John and men divine
Spread the plague of blood and gold abroad,
Who rose like shadows between Man and god”
from Triumph of Life
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“... Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.”
from Masque of Anarchy, 1819
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“'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell”
from Masque of Anarchy, 1819
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“Men of England, Heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty mother,
Hope of her, and one another,
Rise, like lions after slumber,
In unvanquishable number”
from Masque of Anarchy, 1819
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“Gold is a living god.”
from Notes on Queen Mab
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“What art thou, Freedom? Oh! could Slaves
Answer from their living graves...
For the laborer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread...
For the rich thou art a check
Where his foot is on the neck.”
from Masque of Anarchy, 1819
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“Freedom never dreams that God will damn forever
All who think those things untrue,
Of which priests make such ado.”
from Masque of Anarchy, 1819
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“Falsehood is a scorpion that will sting itself to death.”
from Notes on Queen Mab, 1813
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“The crime of inquiry is one which religion never has forgiven.”
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“The same means that have supported every popular belief have supported Christianity: war, imprisonment, assassination and falsehood; deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity have made it what it is.”
from Notes on Queen Mab, 1813
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“War is the stateman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.”
from Notes on Queen Mab, 1813
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“Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes what'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame”
from Notes on Queen Mab, 1813
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“The world is weary of the past,
O might it die or rest at last!”
from Hellas, 1821
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“A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.”
from Notes on Queen Mab, 1813
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“Wealth is a power usurped by the few to compel the many to labor for their benefit.”
from Notes on Queen Mab, 1813
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“If there had never been war, there could never have been tyranny in the world.”
from A Philosophical View of Reform, 1819
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“All that miserable tale of the Devil and Eve, and an Intercessor with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars.”
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“The secret strength of things which governs thought, and to the infinite dome of heaven is as a law”
from Mont Blanc
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“Like day she came, making the night a dream
To move, as one between desire and shame
Thou comest from the realm without a name.”
from Triumph of Life
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“From every form the beauty slowly waned
From every firmest limb and fairest face
The strength and freshness fell like dust, and left
The action and the shape without the grace
Of life; the marble brow of youth was cleft
”
from Triumph of Life
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“Show whence I came, and where I am, and why—
'Arise and quench thy thirst,' was her reply
I rose; and bent at her sweet command,
And suddenly my brain became as sand.
”
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“Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.”
from Alastor, the Spirit of Solitude
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“We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon...
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Naught may endure but Mutability.”
from Mutability
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“We rest—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise—One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh, or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away
”
from Mutability
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“Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations.”
from A Defence of Poetry (1821)
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“History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.”
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“Man who man would be,
must rule the empire of himself.”
from Political Greatness (1821)
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Quotes about Percy Bysshe Shelley (6 quotes)
“Shelley was an iconoclast, a fighter against the commonplace and against corruption. He was the singer of man's emancipation.”
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“The embodiment of all that poetry means, no one was ever more completely or exclusively a poet. No one would have thought, seeing this delicate lad, never quite adult, that he had set all England fuming with his heresies.”
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“Like Jesus, whom he blasphemed, admired, and at times resembled, Shelley would take no thought for the morrow. He stood to lose personally from the social revolution he preached... Unlike the average radical, then, Shelley didn’t just challenge social taboos; he openly violated them, living his personal life in accordance with unpopular principles like equality, women’s rights, and free love. As a result, he became so reviled in England that he had to emigrate”
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“He witnessed the sufferings of the poor, and was aware of the evils of ignorance. He desired to induce every rich man to despoil himself of superfluity, and to create a brotherhood of property and service, and was ready to be the first to lay down the advantages of his birth. He was of too uncompromising a disposition to join any party… it seemed as easy to look forward to the sort of millennium of freedom and brotherhood, which he thought the proper state of mankind… He saw—in a fervent call on his fellow creatures to share alike the blessings of the creation, to love and serve each other—the noblest work that life and time permitted him.”
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“Perhaps Mad Shelley wasn't quite mad enough. Assuredly, in any case, his madness wasn't a madness of the heart.”
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“Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style.”
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