Quotes By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

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?

No one does anything from a single motive.

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

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 poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

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

The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are one, Security to possessors; two, facility to acquirers; and three, hope to all.

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.

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.

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

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

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.

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

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

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

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

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

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

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.

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

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.

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.

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

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