Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Quotes

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.

Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind.

The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

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.

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.

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.

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?

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.

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.

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.

A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.

No one does anything from a single motive.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.

No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

January brings the snow, makes our feet and fingers glow.