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“An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries, with spire steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and star.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Friend, No. 14
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“He saw a lawyer killing a viper
On a dunghill hard, by his own stable
And the devil smiled, for it put him in mind Of
Cain and his brother, Abel.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The Devils Thoughts" (c. 1834)

“Her gentle limbs did she undress,
And lay down in her loveliness.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

Part I, l. 237
Christabel (written 1797–1801, published 1816)

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IX

“God knows, it is as much as I can do to put meat and bread on my own table; & hourly some poor starving wretch comes to my door, to put in his claim for a part of it.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Letter to Thomas Poole (23 March 1801)
Letters

“The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIII

“It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798)

“What is an Epigram? a dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"What is an Epigram?" http://books.google.com/books?id=xUggAAAAMAAJ&q=%22What+is+an+Epigram+A+dwarfish+whole+Its+body+brevity+and+wit+its+soul%22&pg=PA253#v=onepage, The Morning Post, ( 23 September 1802 http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000175/18020923/007/0003)

“The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On Poesy or Art (1818)

“The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIII

“I stood in unimaginable trance
And agony that cannot be remembered.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Remorse, Act iv, scene 3
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin
Is pride that apes humility.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The Devil's Thoughts", st. 6 (1799)

“The frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

" Frost at Midnight http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Frost_at_Midnight.html", l. 1 (1798)

“As in respect of the first wonder we are all on the same level, how comes it that the philosophic mind should, in all ages, be the privilege of a few? The most obvious reason is this: The wonder takes place before the period of reflection, and (with the great mass of mankind) long before the individual is capable of directing his attention freely and consciously to the feeling, or even to its exciting causes. Surprise (the form and dress which the wonder of ignorance usually puts on) is worn away, if not precluded, by custom and familiarity.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Aids to Reflection (1873), Sequelae to Aphorism 107

“The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Cologne" (1828)

“There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

Part I, l. 48
Christabel (written 1797–1801, published 1816)

“Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Said in 1821, as quoted in Letters and Conversations of S.T. Coleridge (1836) by Thomas Allsop

“Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Metrical Feet" (1806)

“I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakspeare!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

15 March 1834
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Frost at Midnight

"Frost at Midnight", l. 72 (1798)