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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

“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)

Light , Dance

“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)

Age , Imagination , Nature , Effort

“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)

Secret

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Heart , Parting

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Aids to Reflection (1829), comment to Aphorism 7

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On the Principles of Genial Criticism (1814)

Idea , Nature , Sense

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. II

Men , Star

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIII

Imagination

“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?"”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Sun

“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?”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

3 January 1834
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Truth , Books , World , Faith

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IV

Imagination

“I've lived and loved.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Love

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poems Written in Later Life, motto (1826)

Love , Way , Heart

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XV

Feeling , Mountain , Birth , Nature

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Faith , Religion , Beauty , Mountain

“Schiller has the material sublime.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

29 December 1822
Table Talk (1821–1834)

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

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

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

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

Men

“Summer has set in with his usual severity.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Letter to Charles Lamb (1826)
Letters

Summer

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

9 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Sense , Housing

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2 January 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Hope

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Letter to Thomas Allsop (30 March 1820)
Letters

Age , Feeling , Drink , Effort

“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!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Smile , Tear

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

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

Love , Life , Truth , Youth

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

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

Sea

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Life , Heart

“My eyes make pictures when they are shut.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A Day-Dream
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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Letter to James Gillman (9 October 1825)
Letters

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Letter to William Sotheby (13 July 1802)
Letters

Passion

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

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

Death , World

“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?”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Anima Poetæ : From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge" (1895) edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, p. 238

Dreams , Soul , Flowers