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

"But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave."

— 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: w. 1821, 1840

"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sister...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

Poetry "reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)