Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."

Quotes

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance.
Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year.
History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man.
Death is a veil which those who live call life, Sleep and it is lifted.
Life may change, but it may fly not;
Hope may vanish, but can die not;
Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;
Love replused - but it returneth
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Spring
There is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

Autumn
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.
A man, to be greatly good, must magine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and in many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.