Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

No man does anything from a single motive.

Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.

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?

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

Some persons have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making the illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: it ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel.

A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions.

Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.