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Quotes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge


He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
An orphan's curse would drag to hell, a spirit from on high; but oh! more horrible than that, is a curse in a dead man's eye!
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are; nor love them less, because to thee they are not what they were.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius - the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
General principles... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Good and bad men are less than they seem.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake - Aye, what then?
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
No one does anything from a single motive.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
O pure of heart! Thou needest not ask of me what this strong music in the soul may be!
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poor little Foal of an oppressed race! I love the languid patience of thy face.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
So for the mother's sake the child was dear, and dearer was the mother for the child.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Language of the Dream/Night is contrary to that of Waking/Day. It is a language of Images and Sensations, the various dialects of which are far less different from each other, than the various Day-Languages of Nations.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Five miles meandering with mazy motion,
Through dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank the tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All thoughts, all passions, all delightsWhatever stirs this mortal frameAll are but ministers of LoveAnd feed His sacred flame.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into, the mind.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Oh sleep! It is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are one, Security to possessors two, facility to acquirers and three, hope to all.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Love is flower like Friendship is like a sheltering tree.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Alas! they had been friends in youth but whispering tongues can poison truth.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge