Quotes from book
Biographia Literaria

Biographia Literaria

Biographia Literaria, or in full Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, is an autobiography in discourse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he published in 1817, in two volumes of twenty-three chapters.


Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“Never pursue literature as a trade.”

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XI

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol.”

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IX

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

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

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IV

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.”

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. II

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity.”

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIV.
Context: The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.

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