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Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on William Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including suspension of disbelief. He had a major influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism.

Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime. He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction. Wikipedia  

✵ 21. October 1772 – 25. July 1834
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 220   quotes 18   likes

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

“A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Nature , Tear

“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

31 May 1830.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Context: The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Imagination

“The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Men , Lie , Beauty , Dead

“The fair breeze blew,
The white foam flew,
And the forrow followed free.
We were the first to ever burst into the silent sea.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Sea

“Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Books , Heart

“The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

23 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“Swans sing before they die— 't were no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Singing , Personality

“He went like one that hath been stunn'd,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Sense

“The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

25 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

God , Falseness

“Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)

“And the spring comes slowly up this way.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

Part I
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Christabel

Way , Spring

“Clothing the palpable and familiar
With golden exhalations of the dawn.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Death of Wallenstein, Act i, scene 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Clothes

“During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XII

Knowledge

“Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,
Death came with friendly care;
The opening bud to heaven conveyed,
And bade it blossom there.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Epitaph on an Infant
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Death

“Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

20 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Animals

“Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XII

Understanding

“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)

Men , Angels , Dependency

“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 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)

War

“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)

People

“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)

Disease , Waiting

“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)

Soul

“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)

Pleasure

“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)

God , Soul , Flowers , Singing

“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

Idea , Sense

“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

Fear , Passion

“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

Truth , Lie , Error , Soul

“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)

Men , Star , Country

“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)

Smile

“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

Truth , Communication

“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

God , Parting

“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

Imagination , Dead

“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)

Pleasure

“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)

Soul

“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

Memory , Time

“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)

Secret

“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

Age , Feeling