Date: 1811

"The senses are the only inlets of knowledge, and there is an inward sense that had persuaded me of this."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1817, 1818

"But the dark fiend who with his iron pen / Dipped in scorn's fiery poison, makes his fame / Enduring there, would o'er the heads of men / Pass harmless, if they scorned to make their hearts his den."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, / Gape like a hell within!"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"Yet am I king over myself, and rule / The torturing and conflicting throngs within, / As Jove rules you when Hell grows mutinous."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"On a poet's lips I slept / Dreaming like a love-adept / In the sound his breathing kept; / Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, / But feeds on the aëreal kisses / Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

"Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow / Back to the burning fountain whence it came."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

And "if the seal is set, / Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, / Break it not thou!"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind o...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)