Quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Chance is but the pseudonym of God for those particular cases, which he does not choose to acknowledge openly with his own sign manual.

The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so.

O let me be awake, my God! Or let me sleep alway.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.

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.

A great mind must be androgynous.

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.

We ne'er can be Made happy by compulsion.

If people could learn history, what lessons it might teach us!

The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends.

What comes from the heart goes to the heart.

The blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook, Hope's gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not.

Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.

No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.

Iago's soliloquy - the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity - how awful it is!

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

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.

Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.

This world has angels all too few, and heaven is overflowing.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.