Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.

In all the universe there is nothing more precious than mind.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act.

I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.

The forehead is the gate of the mind.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment

Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.

I love the human mind.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

Saying that I've THOUGHT about it doesn't mean that I'm DOING it.

The dome of thought, the palace of the soul.

Contemplation is necessary to generate an object, but action must propagate it.

Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. … Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was … that some people can do sums. … It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations could only be made by very clever people.

Non-action is unceasing activity. The sage is characterized by eternal and intense activity. His stillness is like the apparent stillness of a fast rotating gyroscope.

First, then, I say, that the mind, which we often call the intellect, in which is placed the conduct and government of life, is not less an integral part of man himself, than the hand, and foot, and eyes, are portions of the whole animal.

Words are not brains, you know.

Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.

A moment's thought is passion's passing knell.

The way we see things is the source of the way we think or the way we act