Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Poetry immortalizes all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the perishing hallucinations that haunt the interlunar periods of life, and, enveloping them either in language or in form, sends them forth into the world….

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Poetry turns everything into beauty; it increases the beauty of that which is very beautiful, and gives beauty to that which is very ugly; twin joy and terror, pain and pleasure, eternity and change; ... It changes everything it touches ... It tears the veil of ordinary appearance from the face of the world and reveals the bare beauty ... It creates the universe anew after it has been destroyed in our minds by the recurrence of impressions dulled by repetition .

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In the infancy of society, every author is necessarily a poet, because language is poetry; and to be a poet means to perceive the truth and the beautiful, in a word, the good that resides in the relationship established first of all between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.

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According to the time and the nation in which they arose, poets were called in the early ages of the world, legislators were called prophets; the poet, in essence, merges and brings together both of these functions.

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Since the poet belongs to all times, the jury that appreciates him must be composed of his equals; he must be recruited by time from among the choicest of the sages of many generations.

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To seek to transpose the creations of a poet from one language to another would be as wise as throwing a violin into a crucible to discover the essential principles of its color and smell. The plant must spring up again from its seed; for otherwise it will not flourish - this is the burden of the curse of the tower of Babel.

"The worst mistake which was ever made in this world was the separation of political science from ethics."