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Knowledge
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Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Labor
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There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Leadership
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To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Learning
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The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Literary
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Rough wind, that moanest loud
Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all the night long;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main, -
Wail, for the world's wrong!
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dirge
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Love
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Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the heights of love's rare universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire--
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, Epipsychidion (1821)
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All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire is most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Marriage
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Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Money
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All things are sold: the very light of heaven is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Music
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Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Nature
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Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal. Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Pleasure
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The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (written 1821, published 1840)
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Poetry
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Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Power
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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,
A mechanized automaton.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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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
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Progress
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All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Relationships
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If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another s; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Revenge
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Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Seasons
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January gray is here, like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier, march with grief doth howl and rave, and April weeps -- but, O ye hours! Follow with May's fairest flowers.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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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
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O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Snow
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I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Books by and about Percy Bysshe Shelley