Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

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I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
Oh the joys that came down shower-like,
Of friendship, love, and liberty,
Ere I was old!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
For language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
But metre itself implies a passion, i. e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How inimitably graceful children are in general-before they learn to dance.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Solemnly seemest like a vapoury cloud
To rise before me — Rise, oh, ever rise;
Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth!
Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven,
Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Carv'd with figures strange and sweet,
All made out of the carver's brain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!
Yea! every thing that is and will be free!
Bear witness for me, whereso'er ye be,
With what deep worship I have still adored
The spirit of divinest Liberty.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I look'd to Heav'n, and try'd to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in today already walks tomorrow.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The true key to the declension of the Roman empire — which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work — may be stated in two words: — the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The last American war was to us only something to talk or read about; but to the Americans, it was the cause of misery in their own homes.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Each matin bell, the Baron saith,
Knells us back to a world of death.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious Sun uprist.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Women have their heads in their hearts. Man seems to have been destined for a superior being; as things are, I think women generally better creatures than men. They have weaker appetites and weaker intellects but much stronger affections. A man with a bad heart has been sometimes saved by a strong head; but a corrupt woman is lost forever.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A sadder and a wiser man He rose the morrow morn.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge