All men, even the most surly, are influenced by affection.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Love
That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Poetry, Poets
How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Dancing, Dance
A bitter and perplexed, “What shall I do?” is worse to man than worst necessity.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Doubt, Uncertainty
False doctrine does not necessarily make the man a heretic, but an evil heart can make any doctrine heretical.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I love being superior to myself better than (to) my equals.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children; and what an inhuman world, without the aged.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Children
Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts it may be; but still beasts. We only differ in degree, and not in kind; just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists, we are not of the same kind as beasts; and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us that makes the difference.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Soul
Dew-drops are the gems of morning, but the tears of mournful eve.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Gossip
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
Topics: Right, Rightness
To carry the feelings of childhood into the Dowers of manhood, to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Genius
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
Topics: Nation, Nationality, Nationalism, Nations
Oh worse than everything, is kindness counterfeiting absent love.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Kindness
No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Humor
Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Poetry
The stars hang bright above, silent, as if they watched the sleeping earth.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Stars
Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Guilt
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.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Judaism
Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Genius
As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of man, so forethought without reflection is but a phrase for the instinct of the beast.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Forethought
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.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Prayer
Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest philosophy; the essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of reason.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Christianity
If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downward to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Integrity, Progress, Religion, Angels
All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Sympathy, Selfishness
Never yet did there exist a full faith in the divine word which did not expand the intellect while it purified the heart; which did not multiply the aims and objects of the understanding, while it fixed and simplified those of the desires and passions.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Faith
He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Medicine
A rogue is a roundabout fool.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
There are three classes into which all the women past seventy years of age I have ever known, were divided: that dear old soul; that old woman; that old witch.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Aging, Age, Woman
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
Topics: Friends and Friendship
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- William Wordsworth English Poet
- Percy Bysshe Shelley English Poet
- John Dryden English Poet
- William Ernest Henley British Poet, Critic
- William Blake English Poet
- Bernard Mandeville British Writer
- Philip Larkin English Poet
- Christina Rossetti English Poet
- Frances Ridley Havergal English Anglican Poet
- William Cowper English Anglican Poet
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