Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Likeness

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was English poet, literary critic and philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 440   quotes 18   likes

“Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Fear

“His rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

17 April 1823.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Context: Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to play Othello.

Reading

“Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Youth and Age", st. 2 (1823–1832).
Context: Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
Oh the joys that came down shower-like,
Of friendship, love, and liberty,
Ere I was old!

Love , Friendship , Flowers , Tree

“Old Friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air,
Love them for what they are; nor love them less,
Because to thee they are not what they were.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Duty Surviving Self-Love (1826)
Context: O wiselier then, from feeble yearnings freed,
While, and on whom, thou may'st — shine on! nor heed
Whether the object by reflected light
Return thy radiance or absorb it quite:
And tho' thou notest from thy safe recess
Old Friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air,
Love them for what they are; nor love them less,
Because to thee they are not what they were.

Love

“It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The Great Good Man" (1802).
Context: How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits
Honor or wealth, with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.
.........
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? Three treasures,—love and light,
And calm thoughts, regular as infants' breath;
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,—
Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death.

“Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Beauty

“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

“I am dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope — those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love, — for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as one? I say realities; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

10 July 1834
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Love , Life , Youth , World

“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

““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

“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

“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

“I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Letter to Sir Humphry Davy (15 July 1800)
Letters

“Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798)

Dance

“Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A Christmas Carol, viii
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Joy , Summer