Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

412 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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
Antecedently to all history, and long glimmering through it as a holy tradition, there presents itself to our imagination an indefinite period, dateless as eternity; a state rather than a time. For even the sense of succession is lost in the uniformity of the stream.

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

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
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
When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, this is madness.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Stimulate the heart to love and the mind to be early accurate, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord, and all vices will be thrown out.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Motives are symptoms of weakness, and supplements for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best-balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility no less than prudence prescribes deliberation.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Where virtue is, sensibility is the ornament and becoming attire of virtue. On certain occasions it may almost be said to become virtue. But sensibility and all the amiable qualities may likewise become, and too often have become, the panders of vice and the instruments of seduction.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Let it be our first duty to teach thinking, and then what to think about.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place; if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it - low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion - and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
We study the complex in the simple; and only from the intuition of the lower can we safely proceed to the intellection of the higher degrees. The only danger lies in the leaping from low to high, with the neglect of the intervening gradations.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel-dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Never can true courage dwell with them, Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look At their own vices.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
From the time of Kepler to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only all things in external nature, but the subtlest mysteries of life and organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured within the magic circle of mathematical formulae.

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
In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Facts... are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises. The truth depends on, and is only arrived at, by a legitimate deduction from all the facts which are truly material.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge