Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.

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.

The nightmare Life-in-Death was she.

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,Reality's dark dream!I turn from you, and listen to the wind,Which long has raved unnoticed.

A stately pleasure-dome decree.

Remorse weeps tears of blood.

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.

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

An orphan's curse would drag to hell, a spirit from on high; but oh! more horrible than that, is a curse in a dead man's eye!

As long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate.

To be beloved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed.

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

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

Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.

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.

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

All nature seems at work.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect.

Contempt is egotism in ill- humor.

But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me any my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination.

There is small chance of truth at the goal, where there is not childlike humility at the starting-post.

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.

Often do the spirits stride on before the event; and in today already walks tomorrow.

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.

Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet or relief, In word, or sigh, or tear.

Fear gives sudden instincts of skill.

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

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

It [is] very unfair to influence a child's mind by inculcating any opinions before it [has] come to years of discretion to choose for itself.

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.

A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.

Persecution is a very easy form of virtue.

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.

The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it.

The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation.

Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius - the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

An undevout poet is an impossibility.

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.

There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.

Clergymen who publish pious frauds in the interest of the church are the orthodox liars of God.

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

Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

Of no agenor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.

I never knew a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart somewhere or other.

The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.

We ne'er can be Made happy by compulsion.