Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

412 Sourced Quotes

To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
There is small chance of truth at the goal, where there is not childlike humility at the starting-post.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Guardian and friend of the moon, O Earth, whom the comets forget not, Yea, in the measureless distance wheel around and again they behold thee!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I dislike the frequent use of the word virtue, instead of righteousness, in the pulpit; in prayer or preaching before a Christian community, it sounds too much like pagan philosophy.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It is the essence of a scientific definition to be causative, not by introduction of imaginary somewhats, natural or supernatural, under the name of causes, but by announcing the law of action in the particular case, in subordination to the common law of which all the phenomena are modifications or results.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
From dark and icy caverns called you forth, Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks, Forever shattered, and the same for ever? Who gave you your invulnerable life, Your strength, your speed, your fury and your joy, Unceasing thunder and eternal foam?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

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

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

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

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge