Quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.

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.

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

As there is much beast and some devil in man, so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed.

Is duty a mere sport, or an employ! Life an entrusted talent or a toy!

Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.

How well he fell asleepl Like some proud river, widening toward the sea; Calmly and grandly, silently and deep, Life joined eternity.

No sound is dissonant which tells of life.

An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad.

The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.

There is a religion in all deep love, but the love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.

If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil.

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

Never pursue literature as a trade.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.

That gracious thing, made up of tears and light. ††

The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself

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.

I believe that obstinacy, or the dread of control and discipline, arises not so much from self-willedness as from a conscious defect of voluntary power; as foolhardiness is not seldom the disguise of conscious timidity.

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from, as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets.

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