Emily > Emily's Quotes

“The desire of the moth for the star”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“A little while ago I was able to wander in a beautiful sublime fantasy world, in Ossian’s half-dark magical world. But the blessed dreams dissolve; they seem like love potions - they intoxicate, exalt and then disappear, that is the misery and wretchedness of all our feelings. With thoughts it is no better: one easily overthinks things to the point of staleness.”
― Karoline von Günderrode

“There is an infinite force, an eternal life, that is everything that is, that was and will become, that engenders itself in mysterious ways, that remains eternal during all change and dying. It is at the same time the ground of all things and the things themselves, the condition and the conditioned, the creator and the creature, and it divides and separates itself in various figures, becomes sun, moon, stars, plants, animal and human being together, and flows through itself in fresh streams of life and contemplates itself in human beings in holy humility.”
― Karoline von Günderrode

“When tenderness softened her heart, and the sublime feeling of universal love penetrated her, she found no voice that replied so well to hers as the gentle singing of the pines under the air of noon, and the soft murmurs of the breeze that scattered her hair and freshened her cheek, and the dashing of the waters that has no beginning or end.”
― Mary Shelley, Valperga

“What is the world, except that which we feel? Love, and hope, and delight, or sorrow and tears; these are our lives, our realities, to which we give the names of power, possession, misfortune, and death.”
― Mary Shelley, Valperga

“I went up on the hill and walked about until twilight had deepened into an autumn night with a benediction of starry quietude over it. I was alone but not lonely. I was a queen in halls of fancy.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

“Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The Moon

And, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east
A white and shapeless mass.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

“Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs—
To the silent wilderness
Where the soul need not repress
Its music lest it should not find
An echo in another's mind,
While the touch of Nature's art
Harmonizes heart to heart.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“And others came... Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veil'd Destinies,
Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp; the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hymn To Intellectual Beauty

“Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
― Albert Einstein

“Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.”
― John Waters

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“In essence you cannot die, for you have always existed and will continue to do so as a vital aspect of the universe; you are the universe singing in praise of itself.”
― Kristoffer Hughes, The Journey Into Spirit: A Pagan's Perspective on Death, Dying & Bereavement