Samuel Taylor Coleridge

You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose.

The happiness of life, on the contrary, is made up of minute fractions—the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss, a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of playful raillery, and the countless other infinitesimals of pleasurable thought and genial feeling.

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.

Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to his own Evidence.

In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning.

Our myriad-minded Shakespeare.

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

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

On awaking he . . . instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, &c., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.

I pass, like night, from land to land;

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

Her lips were red, her looks were free,

“God save thee, ancient Mariner!

The ice was here, the ice was there,

Boys and girls, / And women, that would groan to see a child / Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war, / The best amusement for our morning meal.

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

Tranquillity! thou better name /(Than all the family of Fame.

Never can true courage dwell with them, / Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look / At their own vices.

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

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.

Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action.

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.

Often do the spirits / Of great events stride on before the events, / And in today already walks tomorrow.

Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

Life is thorny; and youth is vain; / And to be wroth with one we love / Doth work like madness in the brain.

The principle of Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

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.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

The worth and value of knowledge is in proportion to the worth and value of its object.

An orphan's curse would drag to Hell A spirit from on high but oh More horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye.

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

What comes from the heart goes to the heart.

There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided 1. That dear old soul2.