Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

And life is thorny; and youth is vain

‘Alas!’ said she, ‘we ne’er can be Made happy by compulsion.’

Experience informs us that the first defense of weak minds is to recriminate.

Nought cared this Body for wind or weather When Youth and I lived in't together.

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

They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise.

Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving.

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch.

“They did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Rom. i. 28), and though they could not extinguish “the Light that lighteth every man,” and which “shone in the darkness;” yet because the darkness could not comprehend the Light, they refused to bear witness of it, and worshipped, instead, the shaping mist, which the Light had drawn upward from the ground (i.e., from the mere animal nature and instinct), and which that Light alone had made visible (i.e., by super-inducing on the animal instinct the principle of self-consciousness)

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

The river Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash your city of Cologne; But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?

The happiness of life ... is made up of minute fractions — the little soon-forgotten charities of a kiss, a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of playful raillery, and the countless other infinitesimals of pleasurable thought and genial feeling.

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

The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. 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.

A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child.