Samuel Taylor Coleridge quotes - page 11

I am by the law of my nature a reasoner. A person who should suppose I meant by that word, an arguer, would not only not understand me, but would understand the contrary of my meaning. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
This power...reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky, And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun, Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I require in every thing what, for lack of another word, I may call propriety, - that is, a reason why the thing is at all, and why it is there or then rather than elsewhere or at another time. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"They did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Rom. i. 28), and though they could not extinguish "the Light that lighteth every man,” and which "shone in the darkness;” yet because the darkness could not comprehend the Light, they refused to bear witness of it, and worshipped, instead, the shaping mist, which the Light had drawn upward from the ground (i. e., from the mere animal nature and instinct), and which that Light alone had made visible. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like; Friendship is a sheltering tree; Oh the joys that came down shower-like, Of friendship, love, and liberty, Ere I was old! View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakespeare, has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the licence allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Readers may be divided into four classes: 1) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3) Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 4) Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
This is the course of every evil deed, that, propagating still it brings forth evil. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I do not call the sod under my feet my country but language -- religion -- government -- blood -- identity in these makes men of one country. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general Impossible and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, and. prove it abundantly. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to thee. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
For she belike hath drunken deep Of all the blessedness of sleep. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge