Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
For there are deeds which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.
Are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar?
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
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.
Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.
There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.
Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone. But grief returns with the revolving year.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under; And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.
A dream has power to poison sleep.
Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
The young moon has fed Her exhausted horn With the sunset’s fire.
Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are.