Top 380 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Call not that man wretched, who whatever else he suffers as to pain inflicted, or pleasure denied, has a child for whom he hopes and on whom he doats.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

302. “There is small chance of truth at the goal, where there is not childlike humility at the starting-post.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

303. “In your intercourse with sects, the sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the Church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is, or may be, collateral to them. Faith is subjective.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

304. “The genius of Coleridge is like a sunken treasure ship, and Coleridge a diver too timid and lazy to bring its riches to the surface.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

305. “Heart-chilling superstition! thou canst glaze even Pity’s eye with her own frozen tear.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

306. “Show me one couple unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show you ten who are wretched from other causes.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

307. “Metaphysics, – the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

308. “Farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

309. “A woman in a single state may be happy and may be miserable; but most happy, most miserable, these are epithets belonging to a wife.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

310. “History has a point of view; it cannot be all things to all people.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

311. “I dislike the frequent use of the word virtue, instead of righteousness, in the pulpit; in prayer or preaching before a Christian community, it sounds too much like pagan philosophy.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

312. “The form of truth will bear exposure, as well as that of beauty herself.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

313. “The love of indolence is universal, or next to it.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

314. “Death but supplies the oil for the inextinguishable lamp of life.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

315. “On the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in the course of one day.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

316. “Religion is the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It alone will gentilize, if unmixed with cant.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

317. “A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

318. “The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

319. “The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

320. “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.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

321. “To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

322. “Party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

323. “The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

324. “The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. “Thou shalt not” is their characteristic formula.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

325. “The paternal and filial duties discipline the heart, and prepare it for the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachment encourages, not prevents, universal benevolence.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

326. “Seldom can philosophic genius be more usefully employed than in thus rescuing admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

327. “Dryden ’s genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

328. “Conscience is the pulse of reason.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

329. “Christianity is within a man, even as he is gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother’s chair, and with the first remembered, tones of her blessed voice.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

330. “A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

331. “There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

332. “A nation to be great ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

333. “The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigor of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

334. “A Falsehood is, in one sense, a dead thing; but too often it moves about, galvanized by self-will, and pushes the living out of their seats.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

335. “Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

336. “The devil is not, indeed, perfectly humorous, but that is only because he is the extreme of all humor.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

337. “Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

338. “I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble distilled, and as it were super-substantiated.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

339. “Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

340. “How did the atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies?”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

341. “The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are one, Security to possessors; two, facility to acquirers; and three, hope to all.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

342. “As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

343. “Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky! Yea! every thing that is and will be free! Bear witness for me, whereso’er ye be, With what deep worship I have still adored The spirit of divinest Liberty.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

344. “But I do not doubt that it is beneficial sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as in a picture, the image of a grander and better world; for if the mind grows used to the trivia of daily life, it may dwindle too much and decline altogether into worthless thoughts.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

345. “False doctrine does not necessarily make a man a heretic, but an evil heart can make any doctrine heretical.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

346. “Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action – that the end will sanction any means.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

347. “Every human feeling is greater and larger than its exciting cause-a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

348. “As long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

349. “Why look’st thou so?‘ – With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

350. “It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse that distinguishes in order to divide.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge