Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridgewas an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases,...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 October 1772
The devil is not, indeed, perfectly humorous, but that is only because he is the extreme of all humor.
He saw a lawyer killing a viper on a dunghill hard by his own stable; And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind of Cain and his brother Abel.
And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.
If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.
If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil . He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.
Talk of the devil, and his horns appear.
He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.
The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,--the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,--just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we 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.
Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor.
In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.
Religion is the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It alone will gentilize, if unmixed with cant.