Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Trending quotes (page 8)

“Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!
Yea! every thing that is and will be free!
Bear witness for me, whereso'er ye be,
With what deep worship I have still adored
The spirit of divinest Liberty.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"France: An Ode", st. 1 (1798)

Sun

“Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)

Flowers

“He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light, otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find them; and if you could, you could not arrange them.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 September 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

World , Birth , Light

“Dryden's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1 November 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud —
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Dejection: An Ode

St. 5
Dejection: An Ode (1802)

Light , Joy

“O lady! we receive but what we give
And in our life alone does Nature live.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Dejection: An Ode

St. 4
Dejection: An Ode (1802)

Life , Nature

“The heart should have fed upon the truth, as insects on a leaf, till it be tinged with the color, and show its food in every … minutest fiber.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On Poesy or Art (1818)

Truth , Food , Color , Heart

“I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Letter to his brother (1791).
Letters

Truth , Travel , Imagination , Mathematics

“That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIV

Faith

“Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand,
By those deep sounds possessed with inward light,
Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey
Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Fancy in Nubibus
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Light , Sea

““They did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Rom. i. 28), and though they could not extinguish “the Light that lighteth every man,” and which “shone in the darkness;” yet because the darkness could not comprehend the Light, they refused to bear witness of it, and worshipped, instead, the shaping mist, which the Light had drawn upward from the ground (i. e., from the mere animal nature and instinct), and which that Light alone had made visible”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

i.e., by super-inducing on the animal instinct the principle of self-consciousness
Aids to Reflection (1873), footnote to Aphorism 106 part 13

God , Nature , Knowledge , Light

“Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Specimens of the table talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, June 14, 1830, (1835) p. 177

Study

“Poor little foal of an oppressèd race!
I love the languid patience of thy face.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"To a Young Ass", li. 1 (1794)

Love , Patience

“The imagination … that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The Statesman's Manual" (1816)

Truth , Imagination , Birth , Sense

“Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. I

Pleasure , Reading

“Your Sensibilities are tempestuous — you feel Indignation at Weakness — Now Indignation is the handsome Brother of Anger & Hatred — His looks are "lovely in terror" — yet still remember, who are his Relations.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Letter to Robert Southey (29 December 1794).
Letters

Love , Feeling , Anger

“In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends. … But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance, the last is the parent of adoration.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Aids to Reflection (1873), Aphorism 107

Parent

“The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

29 June 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Imagination , Effort , Dependency

“The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2 June 1824
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Past , Future

“Shakespeare is the Spinosistic deity — an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, — epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

12 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Feeling , Horse