Top 100 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes
#1. Christianity is within a man, even as he is gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first remembered, tones of her blessed voice.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#3. On Pilgrim's Progress: I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#4. The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigor of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#5. 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.
- (1772-1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#7. General principles ... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#8. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#9. The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#10. Fellows of colleges in the universities are in one sense the recipients of alms, because they receive funds which originally were of an eleemosynary character.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#11. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#13. What if you slept?
What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in you hand
Ah, what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#14. Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#17. In your intercourse with sects, the sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the Church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is, or may be, collateral to them. Faith is subjective.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#19. Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#21. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#22. I have found in the Bible words for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterance for my hidden griefs and pleadings for my shame and feebleness.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#23. He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#24. Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#25. To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#29. Why is it that so many of us persist in thinking that autumn is a sad season? Nature has merely fallen asleep, and her dreams must be beautiful if we are to judge by her countenance.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#30. Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place; if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#31. Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream!
I turn from you, and listen to the wind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#32. And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#33. Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole! To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, That slid into my soul.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#38. I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#39. The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#42. Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day through twilight.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#43. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#44. Chance is but the pseudonym of God for those particular cases, which he does not choose to acknowledge openly with his own sign manual.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#46. Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between, But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#49. As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#51. There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#52. The blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook, Hope's gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#54. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#55. Never can true courage dwell with them, Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look At their own vices.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#56. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#59. Swans sing before they die - 't were no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#60. The moving moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#61. Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#62. To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#63. The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#65. 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 impression of himself.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#66. From the time of Kepler to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only all things in external nature, but the subtlest mysteries of life and organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured within the magic circle of mathematical formulae.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#68. Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#71. That only can with propriety be styled refinement which, by strengthening the intellect, purifies the manners.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#73. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#76. We must not be guilty of taking the law into our own hands, and converting it from what it really is to what we think it ought to be.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#78. Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#79. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#82. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#83. In the deepest night of trouble and sorrow God gives us so much to be thankful for that we need never cease our singing. With all our wisdom and foresight we can take a lesson in gladness and gratitude from the happy bird that sings all night, as if the day were not long enough to tell its joy.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#84. Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, 'Where is it?'
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#85. How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#86. Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#87. I do not wish you to act from these truths; no, still and always act from your feelings; only meditate often on these truths that sometime or other they may become your feelings.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#88. Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#90. The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
where they were wont to do:
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools -
We were a ghastly crew.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#91. The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#92. For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization science, law; in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting and often leading he way.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#94. Friends should be weighed, not told; who boasts to have won a multitude of friends has never had one.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#96. To know, to esteem, to love,-and then to part,
Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#98. I never knew a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart somewhere or other.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#100. Where true Love burns Desire is Love's pure flame;
It is the reflex of our earthly frame,
That takes its meaning from the nobler part,
And but translates the language of the heart.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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