Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

The soul's joy lies in doing.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Percy Bysshe Shelley

There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
Percy Bysshe Shelley