Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

Chance is but the pseudonym of God for those particular cases, which he does not choose to acknowledge openly with his own sign manual.

That saints will aid if men will call; For the blue sky bends over all!

There is one art of which people should be masters - the art of reflection.

For she belike hath drunken deep Of all the blessedness of sleep.

A stately pleasure-dome decree.

An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.

General principles... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree to its leaves.

Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud. We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, all melodies the echoes of that voice, all colours a suffusion from that light.

Why aren't more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books aren't within everybody's reach.

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear.

To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.

Men, I still think, ought to be weighed not counted.

You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, alone. Certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners.

Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.

The 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.

It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.

Poor little Foal of an oppressed race! I love the languid patience of thy face.

Oh worse than everything, is kindness counterfeiting absent love.

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.

He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.