Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

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About, about, in reel and rout The death fires danced at night.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
The heart should have fed upon the truth, as insects on a leaf, till it be tinged with the color, and show its food in every … minutest fiber.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
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
This world has angels all too few, and heaven is overflowing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.

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

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

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
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yes, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Each matin bell, the Baron saith,
Knells us back to a world of death.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Ha! ha!" quoth he, "full plain I see,
The Devil knows how to row."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Dwarf sees farther than the Giant, when he has the Giant's shoulders to mount on.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Most musical, most melancholy" bird!
A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love,
(And so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself,
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrow) he, and such as he,
First named these notes a melancholy strain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
O dread and silent mount! I gazed upon thee,
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,
Didst vanish from my thought : entranced in prayer,
I worshipped the Invisible alone.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
What! Did Sir W[alter] R[aleigh] believe that a male and female ounce (and, if so, why not two tigers and lions, etc?) would have produced, in a course of generations, a cat, or a cat a lion? This is Darwinizing with a vengeance.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Death but supplies the oil for the inextinguishable lamp of everlasting life.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge