Shelley quotes Flashcards
“What is Love?”
On Love, July (?) 1818
“Ask him who lives what is life; ask him who adores what is God.”
So who do we ask what love is?
Is language internal or external? Is it outward expression, inward thought? Both? One without the other?
(On Love, July (?) 1818)
“I know not the internal constitution of other men, or even of thine whom now I address. I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when misled by that appearance I have thought to appeal to something in common and unburden my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood like one in a distant and savage land.”
Impressions
On Love, July (?) 1818
“With a spirit ill-fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble through its tenderness, I have everywhere sought, and have only found repulse and disappointment”
“Thou demandest what is Love.”
On Love, July (?) 1818
This is followed in the draft by “It is the sweet chalice of life whose dregs are bitterer than wormwood”, then cancelled.
What are we looking for?
On Love, July (?) 1818
“If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew with another’s; if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own”
Love as God
On Love, July (?) 1818
“This is Love”. - The burning connection between like minds. “This is the bond and sanction which connects not only man with man, but with everything which exists.”
The search for our ideal self.
On Love, July (?) 1818
“There is something within us which from the instant that we live and move thirsts after its likeness. It is probably in correspondence with this law that the infant drains milk from its mother.”
Prototype
On Love, July (?) 1818
“A miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving”
Love is going outside yourself.
On Love, July (?) 1818
“A soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise”
“The meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating the deductions of our own, an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret …”
Love tends towards…
On Love, July (?) 1818
An invisible and unattainable point.
Why do “we love the flowers, the grass and the waters and the sky” when in solitude, or that “deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathies not with us”?
(On Love, July (?) 1818)
Love tends towards that point and “it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that, without the possession of which there is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules”
“In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone”.
When does man become a living sepulchre of himself?
On Love, July (?) 1818
When he loses the want or power to love.
“Sterne says that if he were in a desert he would love some cypress. So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.”
Why are we not fascinated by life?
On Life, Nov-Dec, 1819
“The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being.”
“Life, the great miracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous. It is well that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is its object.”
“These things are looked on with little wonder, and to be conscious of them with intense delight is esteemed to be the distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinary person. The multitude of men care not for them. It is thus with Life—that which includes all.”
Signs
“Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing.”
Ecstatic existentialism
“We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle. What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the opinions which supported them; what is the birth and the extinction of religious and of political systems, to life? What are the revolutions of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe of stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their motions, and their destiny, compared with life?”
