Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

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

He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

There is one art of which people should be masters - the art of reflection.

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

Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

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

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

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

My eyes make pictures when they are shut.

The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.

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

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

No one does anything from a single motive.

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.

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

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

Blest hour! It was a luxury—to be!

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

So lonely 'twas that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.

The moving moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside.

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.

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

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

Acquaintance many, and conquaintance few, But for inquaintance I know only two - The friend I've wept and the maid I woo.

And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.

A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune.

A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.

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.

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.

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

Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

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.

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heart-felt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling

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

Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole.

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 principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day through twilight.

A savage place! As holy and enchanted/As e'er beneath the waning moon was haunted/By woman wailing for her Demon Lover!

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

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