Top 492 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Page 2

No man does anything from a single motive.

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

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

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

And in today already walks tomorrow.

What comes from the heart goes to the heart

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Persecution is a very easy form of virtue.

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

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.

It has been observed before that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's spirit.

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

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 .

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

Within today, tomorrow is already walking.

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.

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.

The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it furnished him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, armaments, or playwiths but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing.

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

I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

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

A great mind must be androgynous.

My eyes make pictures when they are shut.

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

All powerful souls have kindred with each other

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.

He prayeth best who loveth best.

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

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.

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

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

How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God.

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?

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.

Silence does not always mark wisdom.

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

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.