8 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes on Ethics

Samuel Taylor Coleridge quotes on ethics

11. Aloof with hermit-eye I scan The present works of present man - A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile, Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!

24. The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.

104. Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth.

125. Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from, - as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets.

137. The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so.

144. You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the market from 8 d. to 6 d. But suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, I take it, after all.

151. If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.

174. How many of our virtues originate in the fear of Death - & that while we flatter ourselves that we are melting in Christian Sensibility over the sorrows of our human Brethren and Sisteren, we are in fact, tho' perhaps unconsciously, moved at the prospect of our own End - for who sincerely pities Sea-sickness, Toothache, or a fit of the Gout in a lusty Good-liver of 50?