Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes page 3

“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.”

"Cologne" (1828)

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

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

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

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

“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!”

"Metrical Feet" (1806)

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

15 March 1834
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Frost at Midnight

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

“What outward form and feature are
He guesseth but in part;
But what within is good and fair
He seeth with the heart.”

“Manly energy … is the proper rendering [for αρετην], and not virtue, at least in the present and ordinary acceptation of the word.”

To a Lady, Offended by a Sportive Observation
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former.”

Aids to Reflection (1829), comment to Aphorism 7

“Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,
Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.”

On the Principles of Genial Criticism (1814)

“Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it.”

"The Homeric Hexameter" (translated from Schiller) (1799)

“The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. II

“Forth from his dark and lonely hiding place
(Portentous-sight!) the owlet Atheism,
Sailing an obscene wings athwart the noon,
Drops his blue-fringèd lids, and holds them close,
And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven,
Cries out, "Where is it?"”

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIII

“I have known books written on Tolerance, the proper title of which would be — intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. Should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next, — those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves?”

" Fears in Solitude http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Fears_in_Solitude.html", l. 81 (1798)

“Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.”

3 January 1834
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IV

“I've lived and loved.”

“In many ways doth the full heart reveal
The presence of the love it would conceal.”

Wallenstein, part i, Act ii, scene 6
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge became habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glorysmitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton аs his compeer, not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own Ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakspeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself.”

Poems Written in Later Life, motto (1826)

“The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths,—all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason.”

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XV

“Schiller has the material sublime.”

Wallenstein, part i. Act ii, scene 4 (translated from Schiller)
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Carv'd with figures strange and sweet,
All made out of the carver's brain.”

29 December 1822
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“Saints will aid if men will call:
For the blue sky bends over all!”

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

“Summer has set in with his usual severity.”

Part I, l. 330
Christabel (written 1797–1801, published 1816)

“Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.”

Letter to Charles Lamb (1826)
Letters

“In the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.”

9 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“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.”

2 January 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost.”

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

“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.”

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)

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

21 September 1830
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.”

1 November 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Dejection: An Ode

St. 5
Dejection: An Ode (1802)

“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)

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

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIV

““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”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. I

“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.”

Aids to Reflection (1873), Aphorism 107

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

29 June 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“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.”

2 June 1824
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise. Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where "I admire" is but a synonyme for "I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it," is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!”

12 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“Aloof with hermit-eye I scan
The present works of present man —
A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile,
Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!”

Letter to Thomas Allsop (30 March 1820)
Letters

“Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth,
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.”

"Ode to Tranquility", st. 4 (1801)

“They stood aloof, the scars remaining,—
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder:
A dreary sea now flows between.”

Part II, l. 408
Christabel (written 1797–1801, published 1816)

“A charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of life.”

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

“My eyes make pictures when they are shut.”

This Lime-tree Bower my Prison
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.”

A Day-Dream
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“But metre itself implies a passion, i. e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader.”

Letter to James Gillman (9 October 1825)
Letters

“Each matin bell, the Baron saith,
Knells us back to a world of death.”

Letter to William Sotheby (13 July 1802)
Letters

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye! and what then?”

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