Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

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Bygone 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!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy; - nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the market from 8 d. to 6 d. But suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, I take it, after all.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Behold! her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,
Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
By dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakspeare!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud —
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The imagination … that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Shakespeare…is of no age—nor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Shakespeare is the Spinosistic deity — an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, — epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from, — as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The last speech [Iago's soliloquy], the motivehunting of a motiveless malignity—how awful!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
The knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are one, Security to possessors; two, facility to acquirers; and three, hope to all.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius - the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of life.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge