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.

Religion is the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It alone will gentilize, if unmixed with cant.

The curiosity of an honorable mind willingly rests there, where the love of truth does not urge it farther onward, and the love of its neighbor bids it stop; in other words, it willingly stops at the point where the interests of truth do not beckon it onward, and charity cries, Halt!

In what way, or by what manner of working, God changes a soul from evil to good, how He impregnates the barren rock--the priceless gems and gold--is to the human mind an impenetrable mystery, in all cases alike.

In Koln, a town of monks and bones, And pavement fang'd with murderous stones, And rags and hags, and hideous wenches, I counted two-and-seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks! Ye nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks, The River Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash your city of Cologne; But tell me, nymphs! what power divine Shall henceforth whash the river Rhine.

Christianity is within a man, even as he is gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first remembered, tones of her blessed voice.

Men of humor are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare.

Call not that man wretched, who whatever else he suffers as to pain inflicted, or pleasure denied, has a child for whom he hopes and on whom he doats.

Cant is the parrot talk of a profession.

For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization science, law; in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting and often leading he way.

Health is a great blessing--competence obtained by honorable industry is a great blessing--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but, that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian.

The paternal and filial duties discipline the heart, and prepare it for the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachment encourages, not prevents, universal benevolence.

If you wish to assured of the truth of Christianity, try it. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of thy belief.

A Gothic church is a petrified religion.

Fear gives sudden instincts of skill.

As long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate.

Never yet did there exist a full faith in the Divine Word (by whom light as well as immortality was brought into the world) which did not expand the intellect, while it purified the heart--which did not multiply the aims and objects of the understanding, while it fixed and simplified those of the desires and passions.

Democracy is the healthful lifeblood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.

The devil is not, indeed, perfectly humorous, but that is only because he is the extreme of all humor.

There is no slight danger from general ignorance; and the only choice which Providence has graciously left to a vicious government is either to fall by the people, if they are suffered to become enlightened, or with them, if they are kept enslaved and ignorant.

Intellect really exists in its products; its kingdom is here.

Memory, bosom-spring of joy.

Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power.

A woman's friendship borders more closely on love than man's. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.

As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.

A rogue is a roundabout fool.

Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams.

The first great requisite is absolute sincerity. Falsehood and disguise are miseries and misery-makers.

Falsehood is fire in stubble; it likewise turns all the light stuff around it into its own substance for a moment, one crackling blazing moment, and then dies; and all its converts are scattered in the wind, without place or evidence of their existence, as viewless as the wind which scatters them.

In your intercourse with sects, the sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the Church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is, or may be, collateral to them. Faith is subjective.

Above all things I entreat you to preserve your faith in Christ. It is my wealth in poverty, my joy in sorrow, my peace amid tumult. For all the evil I have committed, my gracious pardon; and for every effort, my exceeding great reward. I have found it to be so. I can smile with pity at the infidel whose vanity makes him dream that I should barter such a blessing for the few subtleties from the school of the cold-blooded sophists.

Enlist the interests of stern Morality and religious Enthusiasm in the cause of Political Liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible.

On the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in the course of one day.

A bitter and perplexed "What shall I do?" Is worse to man than worse necessity.

Painting is the intermediate between a thought and a thing.

I believe that obstinacy, or the dread of control and discipline, arises not so much from self-willedness as from a conscious defect of voluntary power; as foolhardiness is not seldom the disguise of conscious timidity.

There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.

Remorse is as the heart in which it grows; If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, Weeps only tears of poison.

Ancestral voices prophesying war.

Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.

Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe.

Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.

The more sparingly we make use of nonsense, the better.