Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

412 Sourced Quotes

The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have heard of reasons manifold
Why Love must needs be blind,
But this the best of all I hold,—
His eyes are in his mind.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco—the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All Science is necessarily prophetic, so truly so, that the power of prophecy is the test, the infallible criterion, by which any presumed Science is ascertained to be actually & verily science. The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar eclipse; with Kepler and Newton came Science and Prophecy.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.

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
Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,—
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder:
A dreary sea now flows between.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To see him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

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

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
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
Swans sing before they die: 'twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.

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
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