Play
The archive, at your fingertips
Try an author, a thought, or a phrase in “quotes”.↑ ↓ Navigate · Esc Close

0 words found

Explore all results ↗
PBPercy Bysshe Shelley

151 collected words

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Life dates: 1792 AD — 1822 AD

Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.

▷ Play this voiceSearch these words ↗Place in time ↗lifedeathnaturemindloveworklearningwisdom

Quotations and sayings

02Undated
Prometheus. And thou, O Mother Earth! Earth. I hear, I feel Thy lips are on me, and their touch runs down Even to the adamantine central gloom Along these marble nerves; ’tis life, ’tis joy, And, through my withered, old, and icy frame The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down Circling. Henceforth the many children fair Folded in my sustaining arms; all plants, And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged, And birds, and beasts, and fish, and human shapes, Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom Draining the poison of despair, shall take And interchange sweet nutriment.
Percy Bysshe Shelley / quote
↗
05Undated
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but, when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
Percy Bysshe Shelley / quote
↗
12Undated
The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another, and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.
Percy Bysshe Shelley / quote
↗