Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

Great men have this in common with the Divinity that they never die entirely. Their spirit survives them.

I want to write for history, not for the moment.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

I must admit, maybe I am a piece of history after all.

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not.

I am aware of the words 'national treasure' being attached to me occasionally. It just makes me feel old.

We can not escape history.

Rome is one enormous mausoleum. There, the Past lies visibly stretched upon his bier. There is no today or tomorrow in Rome; it is perpetual yesterday.

Josephine Baker is such an iconic woman that once you've touched her and she has touched you, it never goes away. I'm stuck with her. I'm sure 50 years from now, when they write my obituary, they will mention that I played Josephine Baker. It'll be on my epitaph.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.

Today, I don't believe in destiny. But I do believe in history...There's nothing more powerful than history.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

A person's shadow stood for his legacy, his impact on the world. Some people cast hardly any shadow at all. Some cast long, deep shadows that endured for centuries.

Your current conditions are echoes of your past choices.

Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us

One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.

You may make something you don't think is very important during your lifetime and it'll last for a thousand years.

It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.

She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.