Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Truth Quotes

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The heart should have fed upon the truth, as insects on a leaf, till it be tinged with the color, and show its food in every … minutest fiber.

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
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
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
It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite.

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

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
I have known books written on Tolerance, the proper title of which would be — intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. Should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next, — those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth,
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Truths … are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The imagination … that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
My next shall be a more sober & chastised Epistle — but you see I was in the humour for metaphors — and to tell thee the Truth, I have so often serious reasons to quarrel with my Inclination, that I do not chuse to contradict it for Trifles.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Seldom can philosophic genius be more usefully employed than in thus rescuing admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge