Top 492 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Page 3

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

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

With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.

Blest hour! It was a luxury--to be!

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.

The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.

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

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

And in Life's noisiest hour, There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee, The heart's Self-solace and soliloquy. You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within.

Hamlet 's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.

The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.

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

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

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.

We ne'er can be Made happy by compulsion.

Oh, the difficulty of fixing the attention of men on the world within them!

Democracy is the healthful lifeblood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.

I believe that obstinacy, or the dread of control and discipline, arises not so much from self-willedness as from a conscious defect of voluntary power; as foolhardiness is not seldom the disguise of conscious timidity.

The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost.

There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon.

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.

O lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live.

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.

An undevout poet is an impossibility.

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

It is a gentle and affectionate thought, that in immeasurable height above us, at our first birth, the wreath of love was woven with sparkling stars for flowers.

To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.

Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.

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

All men, even the most surly are influenced by affection.

You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it - low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion - and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, Silent as though they watched the sleeping earth!

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

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.

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

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

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.

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

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.

Genius must have talent as its complement and implement, just as in like manner imagination must have fancy. In short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower.

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

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

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

That gracious thing, made up of tears and light.

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.

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.

Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford.

Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place; if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.

There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.

We should manage our thoughts as shepherds do their flowers in making a garland: first, select the choicest, and then dispose them in the most proper places, that every one may reflect a part of its color and brightness on the next.

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!

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

That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.

The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise. Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where "I admire" is but a synonyme for "I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it ," is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!

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

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.

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

God grant me grace my prayers to say: O God! preserve my mother dear, In strength and health for many a year; And O! preserve my father too, And may I pay him reverence due; And may I my best thoughts employ To be my parents' hope and joy; And O! preserve my brothers both From evil doings, and from sloth, And may we always love each other, Our friends, our father, and our mother, And still, O Lord, to me impart An innocent and grateful heart, That after my last sleep I may Awake to thy eternal day! Amen.