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. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I 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. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are; nor love them less, because to thee they are not what they were. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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? - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge