Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

How inimitably graceful children are before they learn to dance.

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

Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.

I am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which I fear has gone on for an hour without any stop at all.

I am never very forward in offering spiritual consolation to any one in distress or disease. I believe that such resources, to be of any service, must be self-evolved in the first instance. I am something of the Quaker's mind in this, and am inclined to wait for the spirit.

I believe Plato and Socrates. I believe in Jesus Christ.

I feel as if God had, by giving the Sabbath, given fifty-two springs in every year. [Sabbath]

I have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what are the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience that more than three-score years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you, that health is a great blessing; competence obtained by honorable industry is a great blessing; and a great blessing it is, to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian.
[Christian]

I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart, somewhere or other. [Zeal]

I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unraveled the cause: viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.

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

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

I know the Bible is inspired because it finds me at greater depths of my being than any other book. [Inspiration]

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order. [Poets And Poetry]

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake - Aye, what then?

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. [Progress]

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 is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us! [History]

If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable opinion of himself.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.

In the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.