Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes
Why aren't more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books aren't within everybody's reach.
Metaphysics,--the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being.
Men of humor are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare.
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.
The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to interest.
Motives by excess reverse their very nature and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind.
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.
The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulders to mount on.
The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.
This is the course of every evil deed, that, propagating still it brings forth evil.
A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
Iambics march from short to long;-- With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng
On the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in the course of one day.
The devil is not, indeed, perfectly humorous, but that is only because he is the extreme of all humor.
If you wish to assured of the truth of Christianity, try it. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of thy belief.
Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.
The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.
A bitter and perplexed "What shall I do?" Is worse to man than worse necessity.
There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon.
Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .
Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power.
Nothing can permanently please, which doesn't contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.
I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
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 the best order.
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.
May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, Silent as though they watched the sleeping earth!
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.
The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. "Thou shalt not" is their characteristic formula.
That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.
If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.
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.
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.
A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.
Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation
God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, you piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth.
