Samuel Taylor Coleridge
General principles... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves.
Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.
Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.
Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.
Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.
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.
The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are one, Security to possessors; two, facility to acquirers; and three, hope to all.
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.
Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.Collection: Imagination
There is one art of which people should be masters - the art of reflection.Collection: Art
Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind.Collection: Inspirational
Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.Collection: Thinking
Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.Collection: Reading
Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.Collection: Men
Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.Collection: Life
It would not be correct to say that every moral obligation involves a legal duty; but every legal duty is founded on a moral obligation.Collection: Moral
My eyes make pictures when they are shut.Collection: Eye
A great mind must be androgynous.Collection: Mind
What comes from the heart goes to the heartCollection: Attitude
Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.Collection: Happiness
And in today already walks tomorrow.Collection: Teacher
Our own heart, and not other men's opinion, forms our true honor.Collection: Love
The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.Collection: Wise
Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.Collection: Mind
No man does anything from a single motive.Collection: Inspirational
With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.Collection: Wish
Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!Collection: Men
The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise. Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where "I admire" is but a synonyme for "I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it ," is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!Collection: Drinking
The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulders to mount on.Collection: Dwarves
Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.Collection: Poetry
A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions.Collection: People
The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.Collection: Artist
The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity.Collection: Men
Remorse weeps tears of blood.Collection: Blood
We must not be guilty of taking the law into our own hands, and converting it from what it really is to what we think it ought to be.Collection: Thinking
The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself.Collection: Reflection
Water cannot rise higher than its source, neither can human reason.Collection: Water
Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day through twilight.Collection: Twilight
Conscience is the pulse of reasonCollection: Pulse
Prayer is the very highest energy of which the mind is capable.Collection: Prayer
Death but supplies the oil for the inextinguishable lamp of life.Collection: Death
The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakespeare, has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the licence allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible.Collection: Philosophical
No voice; but oh - the silence sank Like music on my heart.Collection: Heart
You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it - low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion - and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.Collection: Passion
Laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment.Collection: Laughter
It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.Collection: Flats
Centres, or centre-pieces of wood, are put by builders under an arch of stone while it is in the process of construction till the keystone is put in. Just such is the use Satan makes of pleasures to construct evil habits upon; the pleasure lasts till the habit is fully formed; but that done the habit may stand eternal. The pleasures are sent for firewood, and the hell begins in this life.Collection: Evil
In your intercourse with sects, the sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the Church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is, or may be, collateral to them. Faith is subjective.Collection: Faith
Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe.Collection: Woe