Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes
English - Poet October 21, 1772 - July 25, 1834


Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.
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

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

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

Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.
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

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.
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

No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.
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

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Good and bad men are less than they seem.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.
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

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

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear.
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

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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No one does anything from a single motive.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.
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

The 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

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 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Alphonse de Lamartine Quotes
French - Poet October 21, 1790 - February 28, 1869


Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.
Alphonse de Lamartine

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.
Alphonse de Lamartine

Brutality to an animal is cruelty to mankind - it is only the difference in the victim.
Alphonse de Lamartine

There is a woman at the begining of all great things.
Alphonse de Lamartine

A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.
Alphonse de Lamartine

The people only understand what they can feel; the only orators that can affect them are those who move them.
Alphonse de Lamartine

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.
Alphonse de Lamartine

Experience is the only prophecy of wise men.
Alphonse de Lamartine

To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
Alphonse de Lamartine

The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs.
Alphonse de Lamartine

Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.
Alphonse de Lamartine

Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.
Alphonse de Lamartine

Private passions tire and exhaust themselves, public ones never.
Alphonse de Lamartine

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.
Alphonse de Lamartine

Habit with it's iron sinews, clasps us and leads us day by day.
Alphonse de Lamartine


Alfred Nobel Quotes
Swedish - Scientist October 21, 1833 - December 10, 1896

One can state, without exaggeration, that the observation of and the search for similarities and differences are the basis of all human knowledge.
Alfred Nobel

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.
Alfred Nobel

Contentment is the only real wealth.
Alfred Nobel

Lying is the greatest of all sins.
Alfred Nobel

Lawyers have to make a living, and can only do so by inducing people to believe that a straight line is crooked.
Alfred Nobel

The first time I saw nitroglycerine was in the beginning of the Crimean War. Professor Zinin in St. Petersburg exhibited some to my father and me, and struck some on an anvil to show that only the part touched by the hammer exploded without spreading.
Alfred Nobel

It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.
Alfred Nobel

Home is where I work, and I work everywhere.
Alfred Nobel

Justice is to be found only in imagination.
Alfred Nobel

Worry is the stomach's worst poison.
Alfred Nobel

On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.
Alfred Nobel

I intend to leave after my death a large fund for the promotion of the peace idea, but I am skeptical as to its results.
Alfred Nobel

Good wishes alone will not ensure peace.
Alfred Nobel

Hope is nature's veil for hiding truth's nakedness.
Alfred Nobel

The truthful man is usually a liar.
Alfred Nobel

A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion.
Alfred Nobel

A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.
Alfred Nobel

For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.
Alfred Nobel

Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.
Alfred Nobel

I am a misanthrope and yet utterly benevolent, have more than one screw loose yet am a super-idealist who digests philosophy more efficiently than food.
Alfred Nobel

I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.
Alfred Nobel

Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age.
Alfred Nobel