Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

412 Sourced Quotes

O struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It were a vain endeavor,
Though I should gaze forever On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are
within.

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

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

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
Never, believe me,
Appear the Immortals,
Never alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Bloom, O ye Amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions — the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge