Top 380 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

252. “For compassion a human heart suffices, but for full and adequate sympathy, with joy, an angel’s only.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

253. “You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

254. “Summer has set in with its usual severity.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

255. “The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

256. “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.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

257. “My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

258. “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!”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

259. “Until my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me burns.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

260. “Friends should be weighed, not told; who boasts to have won a multitude of friends has never had one.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

261. “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.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

262. “A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

263. “Until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

264. “The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

265. “Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

266. “Cant is the parrot talk of a profession.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

267. “Men of humor are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

268. “Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel-dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

269. “Good and bad men are less than they seem.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

270. “Never pursue literature as a trade.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

271. “Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

272. “This is the course of every evil deed, that, propagating still it brings forth evil.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

273. “The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

275. “But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me any my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

276. “I must lay down the law as I understand it, and as I read it in books of authority.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

278. “Persecution is a very easy form of virtue.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

279. “People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

280. “Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

281. “Bells, the poor man’s only music.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

282. “Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

283. “The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

284. “The more sparingly we make use of nonsense, the better.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

285. “Tranquillity! thou better name Than all the family of Fame.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

286. “A man’s as old as he’s feeling. A woman as old as she looks.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

287. “We ne’er can be Made happy by compulsion.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

288. “Democracy is the healthful lifeblood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

289. “If you wish to assured of the truth of Christianity, try it. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of thy belief.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

290. “The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

291. “No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

292. “When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry, I find.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

293. “I believe that obstinacy, or the dread of control and discipline, arises not so much from self-willedness as from a conscious defect of voluntary power; as foolhardiness is not seldom the disguise of conscious timidity.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

294. “All powerful souls have kindred with each other.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

295. “How inimitably graceful children are in general-before they learn to dance.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

296. “A maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely speculative; a “principle” carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

297. “When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, this is madness.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

298. “Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

299. “As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale – my dreams become the substances of my life.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

300. “One thought includes all thought, in the sense that a grain of sand includes the universe.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge