Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:–for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEI wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; – poetry = the best words in the best order.
More Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes
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For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.
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We may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite.
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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.
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Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.
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He prayeth best who loveth best.
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What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if,when you awoke,you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
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To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.
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The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.
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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 .
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The true key to the declension of the Roman empire which is not to be found in all Gibbon ‘s immense work may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.
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Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.
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Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.
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There is one art of which people should be masters – the art of reflection.
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He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
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It is a gentle and affectionate thought, that in immeasurable height above us, at our first birth, the wreath of love was woven with sparkling stars for flowers.
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A man’s as old as he’s feeling. A woman as old as she looks.
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The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions – the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.
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Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
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Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
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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.
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It has been observed before that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet.
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Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.
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The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity.
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The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.
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The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.
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Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where “I admire” is but a synonyme for “I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it ,” is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE