Quotes By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

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.

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.

Good and bad men are less than they seem.

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame.

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor.

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.

A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

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

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

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

Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.

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.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

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

To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.