Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

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

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects, as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to call forth noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As there is much beast and some devil in man, so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The eyeless Chemist heard the process rise, The stormy Chalice bubbled up in sighs..

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Iambics march from short to long;--
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
O it is pleasant, with a heart at ease, Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies, To make the shifting clouds be what you please.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Nutrition by digestion is certainly necessary to life, only under certain circumstances, but that life is previously necessary to digestion is absolutely certain under all circumstances.

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
The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to interest.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It is only mental slothfulness and sluggishness that induce so many to adopt, and take for granted the opinions of others.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.

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

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