Quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Happiness can be built only on virtue, and must of necessity have truth for its foundation.

The heart should have fed upon the truth, as insects on a leaf, till it be tinged with the color, and show its food in every ... minutest fiber.

The form of truth will bear exposure, as well as that of beauty herself.

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.

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.

General principles... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves.

The love of indolence is universal, or next to it.

To know, to esteem, to love,-and then to part, Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart.

Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams.

Stimulate the heart to love and the mind to be early accurate, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord, and all vices will be thrown out.

A spring of love gush'd from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware.

And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you, How oft! I bless the Lot, that made me love you.

I have heard of reasons manifold Why Love must needs be blind, But this the best of all I hold,- His eyes are in his mind.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.

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

Only the wise possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake - Aye, what then?

No one does anything from a single motive.

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premisses, but in the nature and parts of premisses.

So lonely 'twas that God himself scarce seemed there to be.

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing, did certain persons die before they sing.

He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

Language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.