How many of our virtues ...

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?

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?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Quotes from the same author

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

For mother's sake the child was dear, and dearer was the mother for the child.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge