Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.”

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

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

“When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.”

“O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.”

“Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.”