Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

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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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. "Thou shalt not" is their characteristic formula.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It cannot but be injurious to the human mind never to be called into effort: the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity, and sensibility, may be justly ranked among the worst effects of habitual novel-reading.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sympathy and interest are to a lecturer like the sun and the showers to nature - absolutely necessary to the production of blossoms and fruit.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Acquaintance many, and conquaintance few, But for inquaintance I know only two - The friend I've wept and the maid I woo.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Life went a-maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,
When I was young!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A wild rose roofs the ruined shed, And that and summer well agree.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A woman in a single state may be happy and may be miserable; but most happy, most miserable, these are epithets belonging to a wife.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.

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 crying sin of modern criticism is that it is overloaded with personality. If an author commit an error, there is no wish to set him right for the sake of truth, but for the sake of triumph - that the reviewer may show how much wiser, or how much abler he is than the writer.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It surely is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely speculative; a "principle" carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
What, if one reptile sting another reptile? Where is the crime? The goodly face of nature Hath one disfeaturing stain the less upon it.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple tree.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge