How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, “the friend of God,” Abraham was that man.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEHow wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, “the friend of God,” Abraham was that man.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEWe are not of the same kind as beasts, and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of the soul within us that makes the difference.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEThe first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEThe faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGENothing can permanently please, which doesn’t contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEHe prayeth best who loveth best.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGENot 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.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEMan 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 COLERIDGEPersecution is a very easy form of virtue.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEClergymen who publish pious frauds in the interest of the church are the orthodox liars of God.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGERemorse is as the heart in which it grows; If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, Weeps only tears of poison.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGELove is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEIn philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEThe primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEThe author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a “ruined man” is itself a vocation.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEI may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE