Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

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

Wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too.

No voice; but oh - the silence sank Like music on my heart.

No man does anything from a single motive.

The water-lily, in the midst of waters, opens its leaves and expands its petals, at the first pattering of the shower, and rejoices in the rain-drops with a quicker sympathy than the packed shrubs in the sandy desert.

All men, even the most surly are influenced by affection.

Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action.

Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.

The first great requisite is absolute sincerity. Falsehood and disguise are miseries and misery-makers.

What comes from the heart goes to the heart

How did the atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies?

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.

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

Intellect really exists in its products; its kingdom is here.

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

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.

In your intercourse with sects, the sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the Church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is, or may be, collateral to them. Faith is subjective.

A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

Stimulate the heart to love and the mind to be early accurate, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord, and all vices will be thrown out.

Democracy is the healthful lifeblood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.

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.

It would not be correct to say that every moral obligation involves a legal duty; but every legal duty is founded on a moral obligation.

That agony returns; And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.

I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble distilled, and as it were super-substantiated.

The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.

Silence does not always mark wisdom.

The moving moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside.

Persecution is a very easy form of virtue.

The form of truth will bear exposure, as well as that of beauty herself.

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

We ought not to extract pernicious honey from poison blossoms of misrepresentation and mendacious half-truth, to pamper the course appetite of bigotry and self-love.

If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?.

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.

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

Where virtue is, sensibility is the ornament and becoming attire of virtue. On certain occasions it may almost be said to become virtue. But sensibility and all the amiable qualities may likewise become, and too often have become, the panders of vice and the instruments of seduction.

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.

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.

A great mind must be androgynous.

All powerful souls have kindred with each other

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

The first class of readers may be compared to an hour-glass, their reading being as the sand; it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second class resembles a sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third class is like a jelly-bag, which allows all that is pure to pass away, and retains only the refuse and dregs. The fourth class may be compared to the slave of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, preserves only the pure gems.

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.

Men, I still think, ought to be weighed not counted.

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

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man? Three treasures, love and light, And calm thoughts, regular as infants' breath; And three firm friends, more sure than day and night, Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death.