Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Quotes

• Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

• Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into, the mind.

• I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

• What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

• Only the wise possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

• Water, water, every where,
  Nor any drop to drink.

• Experience informs us that the first defense of weak minds is to recriminate.

• Oh sleep! It is a gentle thing,
  Beloved from pole to pole.

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

• If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself.

• Advice is like snow -- the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind.

• 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.

• As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius-- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

• Our own heart, and not other men's opinion, forms our true honor.

• A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

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

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

• No Voice; but oh! the silence sank like music on my heart.

• What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.

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