Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

He prayeth best who loveth best.

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

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe.

A great mind must be androgynous.

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

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.

Enlist the interests of stern Morality and religious Enthusiasm in the cause of Political Liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible.

Blest hour! It was a luxury
to be!

And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Metaphysics,
the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being.

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!

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

When thieves come, I bark; when gallants, I am still - So perform both my master's and mistress's will.

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.

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.

A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.

To leave no interval between the sentence and the fulfillment of it doth beseem God only, the Immutable!

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

But metre itself implies a passion , i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader.

Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.

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

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.

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

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

Moral obligation is to me so very strong a Stimulant, that in 9 cases out of ten it acts as a Narcotic. The Blow that should rouse, stuns me.

The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.

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

Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams.

Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving.

Persecution is a very easy form of virtue.

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

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

Dryden 's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast.

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

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

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

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

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

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

The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer.

In what way, or by what manner of working, God changes a soul from evil to good, how He impregnates the barren rock
the priceless gems and gold
is to the human mind an impenetrable mystery, in all cases alike.

Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain.

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

The nightmare Life-in-Death was she.

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

Conscience is the pulse of reason

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

If people could learn history, what lessons it might teach us!

Within today, tomorrow is already walking.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white

It is the duty of the Judge in criminal trials to take care that the verdict of the jury is not founded upon any evidence except that which the law allows.

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

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.

All powerful souls have kindred with each other

We ne'er can be Made happy by compulsion.

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

The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs! what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?

It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.

A new Earth and new Heaven.

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

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.

There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided: 1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch.

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.

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.

There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. And the fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, retain only pure gems.

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 .

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.

The blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook, Hope's gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not.

I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz . that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.

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

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn.

In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

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

So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to thee.

The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
where they were wont to do:
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools -
We were a ghastly crew.

Where true Love burns Desire is Love's pure flame;
It is the reflex of our earthly frame,
That takes its meaning from the nobler part,
And but translates the language of the heart.

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

Truth I pursued,as Fancy sketch'd the way,
And wiser men than I went worse astray.

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.

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

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

For mother's sake the child was dear,
and dearer was the mother for the child.

Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former.

Motives are symptoms of weakness, and supplements for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best-balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility no less than prudence prescribes deliberation.

During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.

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

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.

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.

As long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate.

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.