Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

412 Sourced Quotes

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
For language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble distilled, and (as it were) super-substantiated.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lovely was the death Of Him whose life was Love! Holy with power, He on the thought-benighted Skeptic beamed Manifest Godhead.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in today already walks tomorrow.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
O the one life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere — Methinks, it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so filled.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
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
Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that anyone born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure that no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian.. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Iago's soliloquy— the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Never, believe me,
Appear the Immortals,
Never alone.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, alone. Certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
On awaking he…instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poor little foal of an oppressèd race!
I love the languid patience of thy face.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge