Poetry: the best words in the best order.
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

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

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

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

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

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
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

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

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

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