Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “The one remains, the many change and pass.”

This line means that while individual things and people are constantly changing and fading away, there is an underlying, eternal essence or spirit that endures. It expresses a philosophical view on the transient nature of existence versus the permanence of fundamental truths or ideals.

From "Adonais," an elegy for John Keats, this quote reflects Shelley's Neoplatonic philosophical leanings. He pondered the immortality of poetic spirit and eternal ideas against the backdrop of physical death and the fleeting nature of human life.

English Romantic poet and radical political thinker whose major works include Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and Ozymandias. He was expelled from Oxford for atheism and spent much of his adult life in exile from England, dying by drowning in Italy at age twenty-nine.