Samuel taylor coleridge quotes

He prayeth best who loveth best.

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

Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.

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

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.

To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.

The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends.

Chance is but the pseudonym of God for those particular cases, which he does not choose to acknowledge openly with his own sign manual.

I never knew a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart somewhere or other.

A bitter and perplexed "What shall I do?" Is worse to man than worse necessity.

Our own heart, and not other men's opinion, forms our true honor.

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

The true key to the declension of the Roman empire which is not to be found in all Gibbon 's immense work may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.

Those who best know human nature will acknowledge most fully what a strength light hearted nonsense give to a hard working man

Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,--the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,--just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts, and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of the soul within us that makes the difference.

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

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

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.

Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.

If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil . He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.

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

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.

Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .

If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?.

If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.

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

Of no agenor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.

As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses , each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.

And in today already walks tomorrow.

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.

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

Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.

The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it.

All nature seems at work.

How inimitably graceful children are in general-before they learn to dance.

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions.

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

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.

The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.

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

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. For what is enthusiasm but the oblivion and swallowing-up of self in an object dearer than self?

All powerful souls have kindred with each other

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

Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

In many ways doth the full heart reveal The presence of the love it would conceal.

It [is] very unfair to influence a child's mind by inculcating any opinions before it [has] come to years of discretion to choose for itself.

What comes from the heart goes to the heart

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

Clergymen who publish pious frauds in the interest of the church are the orthodox liars of God.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.

Silence does not always mark wisdom.

The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. "Thou shalt not" is their characteristic formula.

Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power.

The water-lily, in the midst of waters, opens its leaves and expands its petals, at the first pattering of the shower, and rejoices in the rain-drops with a quicker sympathy than the packed shrubs in the sandy desert.

An undevout poet is an impossibility.

Remorse is as the heart in which it grows; If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, Weeps only tears of poison.

A great mind must be androgynous.

Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

How did the atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies?

Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.

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

Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether.

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

The first great requisite is absolute sincerity. Falsehood and disguise are miseries and misery-makers.

Nothing can permanently please, which doesn't contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.

A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.

To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.

No man does anything from a single motive.

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

My eyes make pictures when they are shut.

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

Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.

Happiness can be built only on virtue, and must of necessity have truth for its foundation.

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

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?

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.

The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.

A woman's friendship borders more closely on love than man's. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.

He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.

Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.

When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness.

Readers may be divided into four classes: 1) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3) Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 4) Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also

Nature has her proper interest; and he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that every Thing has a Life of its own, and that we are all one Life.

It would not be correct to say that every moral obligation involves a legal duty; but every legal duty is founded on a moral obligation.

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.

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

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

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

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

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.

The most general definition of beauty ... Multeity in Unity.

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

The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

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

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

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if,when you awoke,you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad.

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

Persecution is a very easy form of virtue.

To be beloved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed.

Within today, tomorrow is already walking.

This world has angels all too few, and heaven is overflowing.

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

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.

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.

In the deepest night of trouble and sorrow God gives us so much to be thankful for that we need never cease our singing. With all our wisdom and foresight we can take a lesson in gladness and gratitude from the happy bird that sings all night, as if the day were not long enough to tell its joy.

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

Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.

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

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.

History has a point of view; it cannot be all things to all people.

The love of indolence is universal, or next to it.

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man? Three treasures, love and light, And calm thoughts, regular as infants' breath; And three firm friends, more sure than day and night, Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Tranquillity! thou better name Than all the family of Fame.

I love being superior to myself better than [to] my equals.

The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation.

In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends, and admiration fill up the interspace; but the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance, the last is the parent of adoration.

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