He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

— 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 awoke - Aye! And what then?

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

IIA grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear — O Lady! In this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throttle woo'd, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green:And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars;Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel how beautiful they are!III My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?  It were a vain endeavor, Though I should gaze for Everton that green light that lingers in the west:I may not hope from outward forms to withe passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In poems, equally in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Ralph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

— 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

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 their best order.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge