661 Quotes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Where true Love burns Desire is Love’s pure flame; It is the reflex of our earthly frame, That takes its meaning from the nobler part, And but translates the language of the heart.

The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a “ruined man” is itself a vocation.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple tree.

In what way, or by what manner of working, God changes a soul from evil to good, how He impregnates the barren rock – the priceless gems and gold – is to the human mind an impenetrable mystery, in all cases alike.

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

Too soon did the doctors of the church forget that the heart – the moral nature – was the beginning and the end, and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion.

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake – Aye, what then?

Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .

When thieves come, I bark; when gallants, I am still – So perform both my master’s and mistress’s will.