Samuel Taylor Coleridge
138 quotes
Biography
"No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor."
"People of humor are always in some degree people of genius."
"Friendship is a sheltering tree."
"Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree."
"Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole."
"Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom."
"He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope."
"What if you slept?What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in you hand Ah, what then?"
"Silence does not always mark wisdom."
"Water, water, everywhere,And all the boards did shrink;Water, water, everywhere,Nor any drop to drink."
"Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet."
"Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath nor motion;As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean."
"Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns."
"In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea."
"He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration."
"No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher."
"Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony."
"If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us."
"Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception."
"Blest hour! it was a luxury — to be!"
"O! I do love thee, meek Simplicity!"
"Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn."
" When the last rook Beat its straight path along the dusky air"
"What is an Epigram? a dwarfish whole, Its body brevity, and wit its soul."
"The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors."