Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born Oct. 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, Eng., died July 25, 1834, Highgate, near London. English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.
To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.
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.
How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly.
Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth.
Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man.
Poetry: That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
More Quotes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
