Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes & Sayings

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The more sparingly we make use of nonsense, the better. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Experience informs us that the first defense of weak minds is to recriminate. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A Gothic church is a petrified religion. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Men, I think, have to be weighed, not counted. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Jews would not willingly tread upon the smallest piece of paper in their way, but took it up; for possibly, they say, the name of God may be on it. Though there was a little superstition in this, yet truly there is nothing but good religion in it, if we apply it to men. Trample not on any; there may be some work of grace there, that thou knowest not of. The name of God may be written upon that soul thou treadest on; it may be a soul that Christ thought so much of, as to give His precious blood for it; therefore despise it not. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We ne'er can be Made happy by compulsion. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Blest hour! It was a luxury
to be! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I attended [Sir Humphry] Davy's lectures to renew my stock of metaphors. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To be loved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

The most general definition of beauty ... Multeity in Unity. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Clergymen who publish pious frauds in the interest of the church are the orthodox liars of God. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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 ;
And to the leading Love-throb in the Heart
Thro' all my Being, thro' my pulse's beat ;
You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light,
Like the fair light of Dawn, or summer Eve
On rippling Stream, or cloud-reflecting Lake.
And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,
How oft! I bless the Lot that made me love you. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

And to be wroth with one we love ... Doth work like madness in the brain. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This world has angels all too few, and heaven is overflowing. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All Science is necessarily prophetic, so truly so, that the power of prophecy is the test, the infallible criterion, by which any presumed Science is ascertained to be actually & verily science. The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar eclipse; with Kepler and Newton came Science and Prophecy. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Rage is essentially vulgar. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Contempt is egotism in ill- humor. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

The love of indolence is universal, or next to it. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Within today, tomorrow is already walking. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Life went a-maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,
When I was young! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Fear gives sudden instincts of skill. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An undevout poet is an impossibility. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Oh worse than everything, is kindness counterfeiting absent love. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The fastidious taste will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our writers seem to have affected. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What! Did Sir W[alter] R[aleigh] believe that a male and female ounce (and, if so, why not two tigers and lions, etc?) would have produced, in a course of generations, a cat, or a cat a lion? This is Darwinizing with a vengeance. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day through twilight. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

How many of our virtues originate in the fear of Death & that while we flatter ourselves that we are melting in Christian Sensibility over the sorrows of our human Brethren and Sisteren, we are in fact, tho' perhaps unconsciously, moved at the prospect of our own End for who sincerely pities Sea-sickness, Toothache, or a fit of the Gout in a lusty Good-liver of 50? — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

That gracious thing, made up of tears and light. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The primary notion i hold to be the Living Power. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Bells, the poor man's only music. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
Oh the joys that came down shower-like,
Of friendship, love, and liberty,
Ere I was old! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? Can danger lurk within a kiss? — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

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

Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A Falsehood is, in one sense, a dead thing; but too often it moves about, galvanized by self-will, and pushes the living out of their seats. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, this is madness. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the soul of each, and God of all? — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

One thought includes all thought, in the sense that a grain of sand includes the universe. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All powerful souls have kindred with each other — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Every human feeling is greater and larger than its exciting cause-a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Every other science presupposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

Laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He knows well the evening star, and once when he awoke, in a most distressful mood (some inward pain had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream), I hurried with him to our orchard plot, and he beheld the moon, and hushed at once. Suspends his sobs and laughs most silently. While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears, did glitter in the yellow moonbeam. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

The worth and value of knowledge is in proportion to the worth and value of its object. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud. We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, all melodies the echoes of that voice, all colours a suffusion from that light. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If people could learn history, what lessons it might teach us! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry, I find. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No voice; but oh - the silence sank Like music on my heart. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

They passed the hall, that echoes still,
Pass as lightly as you will.
The brands were flat, the brands were dying,
Amid their own white ashes lying;
But when the lady passed, there came
A tongue of light, a fit of flame;
And Christabel saw the lady's eye,
And nothing else saw she thereby, — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The heart should have fed upon the truth, as insects on a leaf, till it be tinged with the color, and show its food in every ... minutest fiber. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As long as we have to administer the law we must do so according to the law as it is. We are not here to make the law. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare; But ere my living life returned, I heard and in my soul discerned Two VOICES in the air. "Is it he?" quoth one, "Is this the man? By him who died on cross, With his cruel bow he laid full low, The harmless Albatross. "The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow." The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he, "The man hath penance done, And penance more will do. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cuttings, integra et in toto! She is sure to get the better of Lady MIND in the long run, and to take her revenge too transforms our To Day into a Canvass dead-colored to receive the dull featureless Portait of Yesterday. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, 'Where is it?' — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A rogue is a roundabout fool. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I do not wish you to act from these truths; no, still and always act from your feelings; only meditate often on these truths that sometime or other they may become your feelings. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge