Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

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Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cuttings, integra et in toto! She is sure to get the better of Lady MIND in the long run, and to take her revenge too — transforms our To Day into a Canvass dead-colored to receive the dull featureless Portait of Yesterday.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
No voice; but oh! the silence sank
Like music on my heart.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Oh Sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole.
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He Prayeth best, who loveth best;
All things great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us;
He made and loveth all.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge