Samuel Taylor Coleridge quotes:

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

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

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

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

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

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

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 politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.

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

And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are; nor love them less, because to thee they are not what they were.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.

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

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

Good and bad men are less than they seem.

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

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.

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.

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

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

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

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

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

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.

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.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

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

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."

Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it."

He saw a lawyer killing a viper on a dunghill hard by his own stable; And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind of Cain and his brother Abel.

Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.

In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends, and admiration fill up the interspace; but the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance, the last is the parent of adoration.

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks / Had I from old and young! / Instead of the cross, the Albatross / About my neck was hung.

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

A great mind must be androgynous.

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.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple tree.

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.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel-dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.

Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if,when you awoke,you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.

Silence does not always mark wisdom.

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain.

Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action - that the end will sanction any means.

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.

I dislike the frequent use of the word virtue, instead of righteousness, in the pulpit; in prayer or preaching before a Christian community, it sounds too much like pagan philosophy.

The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

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

You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the market from 8 d. to 6 d. But suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, I take it, after all.

In Koln, a town of monks and bones, And pavement fang'd with murderous stones, And rags and hags, and hideous wenches, I counted two-and-seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks! Ye nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks, The River Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash your city of Cologne; But tell me, nymphs! what power divine Shall henceforth whash the river Rhine.

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?

Mr. Mum's Rudesheimer And the church of St. Geryon Are the two things alone That deserve to be known In the body-and-soul-stinking town of Cologne.

Imagination that compares and contrasts with what is around as well as what is better and worse is the living power and prime agent of all human perception judgement and emotional reaction.

The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.

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

And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.

A stately pleasure-dome decree.

Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation

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

The most general definition of beauty ... Multeity in Unity.

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

Truths ... are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.

Dryden 's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast.

Come, come thou bleak December wind, And blow the dry leaves from the tree! Flash, like a Love-thought, thro'me, Death And take a Life that wearies me.

The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulders to mount on.

I understood that you would take the Human Race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope's Essay on Man, [Erasmus] Darwin, and all the countless Believers-even (strange to say) among Xtians-of Man's having progressed from an Ouran Outang state-so contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay, to all Possibility-to have affirmed a Fall in some sense.

The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to call forth noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed.

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

The paternal and filial duties discipline the heart, and prepare it for the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachment encourages, not prevents, universal benevolence.

Poor little Foal of an oppressed race! I love the languid patience of thy face.

As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.

The blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook, Hope's gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not.

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions.

In many ways doth the full heart reveal The presence of the love it would conceal.

Religion is the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It alone will gentilize, if unmixed with cant.

You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, alone. Certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners.

With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

Why aren't more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books aren't within everybody's reach.

Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.

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

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?

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.

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.

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear.

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.

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.

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

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.

Her skin was white as leprosy.

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.

Those who best know human nature will acknowledge most fully what a strength light hearted nonsense give to a hard working man

Acquaintance many, and conquaintance few, But for inquaintance I know only two - The friend I've wept and the maid I woo.

Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.

In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.

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

I ago's soliloquy--the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity--how awful it is!

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.

The more sparingly we make use of nonsense, the better.

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.

There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided: 1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch.

To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.

Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.

The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.

Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe.

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.