Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Trending quotes

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 440 quotes18 likes

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

30 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The Reproof and Reply" (1823); the eighth commandment is "Thou shalt not steal".

“The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Dejection: An Ode

St. 1
Dejection: An Ode (1802)

“That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

9 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“I am dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope — those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love, — for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as one? I say realities; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

10 July 1834
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

" Cologne http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Cologne.html" (1828)

“Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798)

“Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton" (1811–1812)

“The true key to the declension of the Roman empire — which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work — may be stated in two words: — the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

15 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“I am never very forward in offering spiritual consolation to any one in distress or disease. I believe that such resources, to be of any service, must be self-evolved in the first instance. I am something of the Quaker's mind in this, and am inclined to wait for the spirit.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

20 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“To know, to esteem, to love, and then to part,
Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On taking Leave of ———— (1817)
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“The knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The Knight's Tomb" (c. 1817)

“In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The Ovidian Elegiac Metre" (translated from Schiller) (1799)

“The Dwarf sees farther than the Giant, when he has the Giant's shoulders to mount on.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Friend; A Series of Essays (1812), No. 15 (30 November 1809), p. 228
Cf. Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke (15 February 1676): "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants".

“Farce may often border on tragedy; indeed, farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

20 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798)

“Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flower
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?
'God!' let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, 'God!'
'God! ' sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, 'God!'.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)

“An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IX

“He has no native Passion, because he is not a Thinker — & has probably weakened his Intellect by the haunting Fear of becoming extravagant.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Letter to William Sotheby (10 September 1802)
Letters

“Truths … are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Aids to Reflection (1873), Aphorism 1