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Ability
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Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Actors, Acting
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To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Age
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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.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Alcohol/Alcoholism
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Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Animals
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Poor little Foal of an oppressed race! I love the languid patience of thy face.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Architecture
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The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Atheism
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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
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Criticism
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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.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Dance, Dancing
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How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Death
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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!
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Dreams
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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 an strange and beautiful flower?
And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand?
Ah, what then?
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Enthusiasm
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Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Experience
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To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Friends
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Friendship is a sheltering tree.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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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
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Genius
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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.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Goodness
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Good and bad men are less than they seem.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Gossip
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Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Government
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The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are -- 1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and, 3. Hope to all.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Greatness & Great Things
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Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Honor
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Our own heart, and not other men's opinion, forms our true honor.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Humor
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People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Ideas
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The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Kindness
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Oh worse than everything, is kindness counterfeiting absent love.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Language
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Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Love
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All thoughts, all passions, all delightsWhatever stirs this mortal frameAll are but ministers of LoveAnd feed His sacred flame.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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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.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Marriage
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The most happy marriage I can imagine to myselfwould be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Medicine
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He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Motivational
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What comes from the heart, goes to the heart.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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No one does anything from a single motive.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language -- religion -- government -- blood -- identity in these makes men of one country.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Opinion
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Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Parliament
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You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it -- low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion -- and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Plagiarism
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Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Poetry
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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.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Politics
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In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Pride
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And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Proverbial Wisdom
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What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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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.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Quotations
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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
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Recovery (addiction/alcoholism)
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My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Reform, Correction
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Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, which will itself need reforming.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Religion
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A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy; -- nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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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.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Right, Rightness
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Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Seasons
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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.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight
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Self-love
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He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect better than Christianity and end in loving himself better than all.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Sex
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How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, and. prove it abundantly.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Singing
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Swans sing before they die -- t'were no bad thing did certain persons die before they sing.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Sleep
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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
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Snow
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Advice is like snow -- the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, attributed - no source found
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Sympathy
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All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Things, Little Things
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The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions -- the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimal of pleasurable and genial feeling.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Tolerance
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I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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War
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Five miles meandering with mazy motion,
Through dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank the tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Kahn
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Water
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Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798
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Words
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Prose, words in their best order. Poetry, the best words in the best order.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Books by and about Samuel Taylor Coleridge
