Date: 1820

"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

"Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung, / From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour sprung."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

"And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, / Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

One may have "A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

"Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief / Convulse us and consume us day by day, / And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1824

"'I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, / Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, / And suddenly my brain became as sand / 'Where the first wave had more than half erased / The track of deer on desert Labrador; / Whilst the wolf, from which they fled amazed, / 'Leaves his stamp visibly u...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"For Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship - what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave - and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where th...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: September 2, 2011

"We speak of exerting will power, of forcing ourselves to go to work, of restraining ourselves and of controlling our temper, as if it were an unruly dog."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)