Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

O it is pleasant, with a heart at ease, Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies, To make the shifting clouds be what you please.

For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten.

The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

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

Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power.

There is nothing insignificant-nothing.

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.

If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.

The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigor of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.

There is no slight danger from general ignorance; and the only choice which Providence has graciously left to a vicious government is either to fall by the people, if they are suffered to become enlightened, or with them, if they are kept enslaved and ignorant.

The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it.

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

Oh Sleep! it is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole, to Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, that slid into my soul.

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

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

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

A stately pleasure-dome decree.

My eyes make pictures when they are shut.

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.

Too soon did the doctors of the church forget that the heart--the moral nature--was the beginning and the end, and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion.

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

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear.

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

Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.

To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.

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

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.

A Court has no right to strain the law because it causes hardship.

Everyone should have two or three hives of bees. Bees are easier to keep than a dog or a cat. They are more interesting than gerbils.

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

All nature seems at work.

It [is] very unfair to influence a child's mind by inculcating any opinions before it [has] come to years of discretion to choose for itself.

He holds him with his glittering eye, And listens like a three years' child.

Cant is the parrot talk of a profession.

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.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.

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

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.

That gracious thing, made up of tears and light.

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

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.

Some persons have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making the illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: it ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius - the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

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

We are now Courts of equity, and must decide the thing according to all the rights.

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

A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.