Quotes By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

General principles... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves.

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

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

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear.

The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

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.

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

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.

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.

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.

Good and bad men are less than they seem.

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

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.

All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

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

Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor.

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

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

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.

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

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

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.

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.

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?