Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A romantic poet warning you not to trust your own moral sorting hat. Coleridge’s line turns a deceptively simple observation into a critique of how quickly we turn people into symbols: the saint, the villain, the redeemed, the damned. “Less than they seem” doesn’t mean people are secretly worse. It means our categories are inflated, theatrical projections, and the person underneath is smaller, messier, more contingent than the role we assign.

The phrasing matters. “Good and bad men” are presented as parallel constructions, equally suspect. Coleridge isn’t flattening ethics into mush; he’s puncturing the ego-driven certainty that comes from labeling. To call someone “good” can be a way of excusing them from scrutiny. To call someone “bad” can be a way of refusing curiosity and collapsing a whole life into a single act, rumor, or posture. The subtext is psychological: moral judgment often reveals the judge’s needs - for clarity, for control, for a story with clean edges - more than it reveals the judged.

Contextually, this lands in an era obsessed with character as destiny, when biography, reputation, and public virtue were treated like stable currencies. Coleridge, whose own life braided brilliance with addiction, debt, and self-reproach, had reasons to distrust the neatness of reputations. Romanticism prized inner complexity and shifting states of mind; this line is that sensibility turned outward. It argues for moral modesty: keep your standards, but loosen your certainty about the people you’re tempted to summarize.