Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotations

Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind.

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.

Good and bad men are less than they seem.

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.

The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear.

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake - Aye, what then?

A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.

Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor.

All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame.

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.

And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are; nor love them less, because to thee they are not what they were.

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.

A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth, And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny, and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain.

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.

A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.

General principles... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.

The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are one, Security to possessors; two, facility to acquirers; and three, hope to all.

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.

No one does anything from a single motive.

Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,--the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,--just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts, and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of the soul within us that makes the difference.

He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.

Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether.

A great mind must be androgynous.

Readers may be divided into four classes: 1) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3) Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 4) Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.

Nature has her proper interest; and he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that every Thing has a Life of its own, and that we are all one Life.

And in today already walks tomorrow.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

Silence does not always mark wisdom.

The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

What comes from the heart goes to the heart

There is one art of which people should be masters - the art of reflection.

Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.

A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions.

'Tis a month before the month of May, And the spring comes slowly up this way.

Our own heart, and not other men's opinion, forms our true honor.

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole.

All men, even the most surly are influenced by affection.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

Lovely was the death Of Him whose life was Love! Holy with power, He on the thought-benighted Skeptic beamed Manifest Godhead.

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.

He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if,when you awoke,you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

My eyes make pictures when they are shut.

The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise. Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where "I admire" is but a synonyme for "I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it ," is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!

Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, ''Where is it?''

Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people.

God is everywhere! the God who framed Mankind to be one, mighty family, Himself our Father, and the world our home.

Friends should be weighed, not told; who boasts to have won a multitude of friends has never had one.

In the deepest night of trouble and sorrow God gives us so much to be thankful for that we need never cease our singing. With all our wisdom and foresight we can take a lesson in gladness and gratitude from the happy bird that sings all night, as if the day were not long enough to tell its joy.

All Science is necessarily prophetic, so truly so, that the power of prophecy is the test, the infallible criterion, by which any presumed Science is ascertained to be actually & verily science. The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar eclipse; with Kepler and Newton came Science and Prophecy.

Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth.

Some persons have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making the illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: it ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel.

How did the atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies?

That gracious thing, made up of tears and light.

God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, you piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!

Courage multiplies the chances of success by sometimes making opportunities, and always availing itself of them; and in this sense Fortune may be said to favor fools by those who, however prudent in their opinion, are deficient in valor and enterprise.

How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God.