Samuel Taylor Coleridge quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

There is small chance of truth at the goal, where there is not childlike humility at the starting-post.

Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.

A wild rose roofs the ruined shed, And that and summer well agree.

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

My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties.

I look'd to Heav'n, and try'd to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

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.

That gracious thing, made up of tears and light.

How strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day!

Contempt is egotism in ill- humor.

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

We have to administer the law whether we like it or no.

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

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

I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language-religion-government-blood-identity in these makes men of one country.

False doctrine does not necessarily make a man a heretic, but an evil heart can make any doctrine heretical.

What comes from the heart goes to the heart

When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry, I find.

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

I ago's soliloquy
the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity
how awful it is!

One thought includes all thought, in the sense that a grain of sand includes the universe.

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

I have heard of reasons manifold
Why Love must needs be blind,
But this the best of all I hold,-
His eyes are in his mind.

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

A woman in a single state may be happy and may be miserable; but most happy, most miserable, these are epithets belonging to a wife.

A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Bells, the poor man's only music.

The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark.

Swans sing before they die - 't were no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.

The once red leaf, the last of its clan, that dances as often as dance it can.

But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me any my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.

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

The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.

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.

Friends should be weighed, not told; who boasts to have won a multitude of friends has never had one.

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

Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.

This is the course of every evil deed, that, propagating still it brings forth evil.

The devil is not, indeed, perfectly humorous, but that is only because he is the extreme of all humor.

O pure of heart! Thou needest not ask of me what this strong music in the soul may be!

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

A great mind must be androgynous.

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

An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

The form of truth will bear exposure, as well as that of beauty herself.

An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol.

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.

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she.

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

A spring of love gush'd from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware.

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

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

Rage is essentially vulgar.

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

The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to interest.

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

The selfmoment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.

The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulders to mount on.

And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

My eyes make pictures when they are shut.

Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.

And they three passed over the white sands, between the rocks, silent as the shadows.

Prayer is the very highest energy of which the mind is capable.

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

The more sparingly we make use of nonsense, the better.

I stood in unimaginable trance And agony that cannot be remembered.

What a scream of agony by torture lengthened out that lute sent forth!

In nature there is nothing melancholy

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.

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

For she belike hath drunken deep Of all the blessedness of sleep.

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

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

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

Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship, Yet she sailed softly too: Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze - On me alone it blew.

Death but supplies the oil for the inextinguishable lamp of life.

Persecution is a very easy form of virtue.

Then all the charm
Is broken
all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other.

Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.

He saw a lawyer killing a viper on a dunghill hard by his own stable; And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind of Cain and his brother Abel.

That saints will aid if men will call; For the blue sky bends over all!

Lovely was the death Of Him whose life was Love! Holy with power, He on the thought-benighted Skeptic beamed Manifest Godhead.

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel-dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream!
I turn from you, and listen to the wind.

To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters.

Memory, bosom-spring of joy.

On Pilgrim's Progress: I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors.

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

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

How well he fell asleepl Like some proud river, widening toward the sea; Calmly and grandly, silently and deep, Life joined eternity.

He went like one that hath been stunn'd,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.

'Tis a month before the month of May,
And the spring comes slowly up this way.