“Intellect really exists in its products; its kingdom is here.”
“A maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely speculative; a "principle" carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective.”
“Memory, bosom-spring of joy.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Metaphysics,--the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being.”
Source: Aids to reflection, in the formation of a manly character ... illustrated by select passages ... especially from Archbishop Leighton ... First American, from the first London edition ... Together with a preliminary essay, and additional notes, by James Marsh
“Method means primarily a way or path of transit. From this we are to understand that the first idea of method is a progressive transition from one step to another in any course. If in the right course, it will be the true method; if in the wrong, we cannot hope to progress.”
“Motives are symptoms of weakness, and supplements for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best-balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility no less than prudence prescribes deliberation.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetry, Plays, Literary Essays, Lectures, Autobiography and Letters (Classic Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of the English poet, literary critic and philosopher, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems and Biographia Literaria
“I never knew a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart somewhere or other.”
“Rage is essentially vulgar.”
“The first class of readers may be compared to an hour-glass, their reading being as the sand; it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second class resembles a sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third class is like a jelly-bag, which allows all that is pure to pass away, and retains only the refuse and dregs. The fourth class may be compared to the slave of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, preserves only the pure gems.”
“That only can with propriety be styled refinement which, by strengthening the intellect, purifies the manners.”
“Too soon did the doctors of the church forget that the heart--the moral nature--was the beginning and the end, and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion.”
Source: Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion: Illustrated by Select Passages from Our Elder Divines, Especially from Archbishop Leighton
“The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to interest.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetry, Plays, Literary Essays, Lectures, Autobiography and Letters (Classic Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of the English poet, literary critic and philosopher, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems and Biographia Literaria
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Courage multiplies the chances of success by sometimes making opportunities, and always availing itself of them; and in this sense Fortune may be said to favor fools by those who, however prudent in their opinion, are deficient in valor and enterprise.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Death but supplies the oil for the inextinguishable lamp of life.”
Source: Notes: Theological, Political and Miscellaneous
“The water-lily, in the midst of waters, opens its leaves and expands its petals, at the first pattering of the shower, and rejoices in the rain-drops with a quicker sympathy than the packed shrubs in the sandy desert.”
“Friends should be weighed, not told; who boasts to have won a multitude of friends has never had one.”
“God is everywhere! the God who framed
Mankind to be one, mighty family,
Himself our Father, and the world our home.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“How did the atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies?”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, you piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!”
Source: Poetical Works of Samuel T. Coleridge
“Centres, or centre-pieces of wood, are put by builders under an arch of stone while it is in the process of construction till the keystone is put in. Just such is the use Satan makes of pleasures to construct evil habits upon; the pleasure lasts till the habit is fully formed; but that done the habit may stand eternal. The pleasures are sent for firewood, and the hell begins in this life.”
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated)
“God grant me grace my prayers to say:
O God! preserve my mother dear,
In strength and health for many a year;
And O! preserve my father too,
And may I pay him reverence due;
And may I my best thoughts employ
To be my parents' hope and joy;
And O! preserve my brothers both
From evil doings, and from sloth,
And may we always love each other,
Our friends, our father, and our mother,
And still, O Lord, to me impart
An innocent and grateful heart,
That after my last sleep I may
Awake to thy eternal day! Amen.”
Source: The Poetical Works of Samuel T. Coleridge
“The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. "Thou shalt not" is their characteristic formula.”
Source: Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion: Illustrated by Select Passages from Our Elder Divines, Especially from Archbishop Leighton
“To leave no interval between the sentence and the fulfillment of it doth beseem God only, the Immutable!”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“I feel as if God had, by giving the Sabbath, given fifty-two springs in every year.”
“Oh, the difficulty of fixing the attention of men on the world within them!”
“Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.”
Source: Coleridge's Shakespearean criticism
“The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to call forth noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed.”
“The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.”
“Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,--the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,--just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, 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 the soul within us that makes the difference.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated)
“It is a gentle and affectionate thought, that in immeasurable height above us, at our first birth, the wreath of love was woven with sparkling stars for flowers.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“A nation to be great ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetry, Plays, Literary Essays, Lectures, Autobiography and Letters (Classic Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of the English poet, literary critic and philosopher, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems and Biographia Literaria
“Wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too.”
“Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge with an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Heart-chilling superstition! thou canst glaze even Pity's eye with her own frozen tear.”
Source: The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Complete in One Volume
“A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.”
Source: Letters, conversations, and recollections of S. T. Coleridge: in two volumes
“One thought includes all thought, in the sense that a grain of sand includes the universe.”
Source: Letters, Conversations and Recollections
“Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,
To dally with wrong that does no harm.”
Source: Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Man Behind The Lyrics (Illustrated Edition): Autobiographical Works (Memoirs, Complete Letters, Literary Introspection, Thoughts and Notes on Poetry); Including Extensive Biographies and Studies on S. T. Coleridge
“We should manage our thoughts as shepherds do their flowers in making a garland: first, select the choicest, and then dispose them in the most proper places, that every one may reflect a part of its color and brightness on the next.”
“There is small chance of truth at the goal, where there is not childlike humility at the starting-post.”
Source: Coleridge's Aids to reflection: with the author's last corrections
“The fastidious taste will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our writers seem to have affected.”
“A woman in a single state may be happy and may be miserable; but most happy, most miserable, these are epithets belonging to a wife.”
Source: Letters, conversations, and recollections [ed. by T.Allsop].
“The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Motives by excess reverse their very nature and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“There is no such thing as a worthless book though there are some far worse than worthless; no book that is not worth preserving, if its existence may be tolerated; as there may be some men whom it may be proper to hang, but none should be suffered to starve.”
“The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.”
Source: Shakespeare, With Introductory Matter on Poetry, The Drama, and The Stage by S.T. Coleridge: Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Old Poets and Dramatists
