Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

412 Sourced Quotes

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
There is no such thing as a worthless book though there are some far worse than worthless; no book that is not worth preserving, if its existence may be tolerated; as there may be some men whom it may be proper to hang, but none should be suffered to starve.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Heart-chilling superstition! thou canst glaze even Pity's eye with her own frozen tear.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Too soon did the doctors of the church forget that the heart--the moral nature--was the beginning and the end, and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Mr. Mum's Rudesheimer
And the church of St. Geryon
Are the two things alone
That deserve to be known
In the body-and-soul-stinking town of Cologne.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
For compassion a human heart suffices, but for full and adequate sympathy, with joy, an angel's only.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A nation to be great ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He knows well the evening star, and once when he awoke, in a most distressful mood (some inward pain had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream), I hurried with him to our orchard plot, and he beheld the moon, and hushed at once. Suspends his sobs and laughs most silently. While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears, did glitter in the yellow moonbeam.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, and. prove it abundantly.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
This dark, frieze-coated, hoarse, teeth-chattering month.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The abracadabra of Science accordingly, like the incantations and jargon of the astrologers and necromancers of the middle ages, fills the uninitiated with reverence and fosters this insensate idolatry.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro'me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The positions of science must be tried in the jeweller's scales, not like the mixed commodities of the market, on the weigh-bridge of common opinion and vulgar usage.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, Silent as though they watched the sleeping earth!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or ornaments, or playwiths, but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It shows the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
One thought includes all thought, in the sense that a grain of sand includes the universe.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? Can danger lurk within a kiss?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Motives by excess reverse their very nature and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge