“Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? Can danger lurk within a kiss?”
Source: Select Poetical Works
“Laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil . He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Water cannot rise higher than its source, neither can human reason.”
“No sound is dissonant which tells of life.”
“Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!
Yea! every thing that is and will be free!
Bear witness for me, whereso'er ye be,
With what deep worship I have still adored
The spirit of divinest Liberty.”
“O lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live.”
“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.”
Source: Specimens of the table talk
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetry, Plays, Literary Essays, Lectures, Autobiography and Letters (Classic Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of the English poet, literary critic and philosopher, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems and Biographia Literaria
“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.”
Source: Opus Maximum
“Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetry, Plays, Literary Essays, Lectures, Autobiography and Letters (Classic Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of the English poet, literary critic and philosopher, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems and Biographia Literaria
“Never pursue literature as a trade.”
Source: Biographia Literaria; Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions
“The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakespeare, has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the licence allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible.”
Source: Shakespeare, With Introductory Matter on Poetry, The Drama, and The Stage by S.T. Coleridge: Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Old Poets and Dramatists
“The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“How many of our virtues originate in the fear of Death & that while we flatter ourselves that we are melting in Christian Sensibility over the sorrows of our human Brethren and Sisteren, we are in fact, tho' perhaps unconsciously, moved at the prospect of our own End for who sincerely pities Sea-sickness, Toothache, or a fit of the Gout in a lusty Good-liver of 50?”
Source: Collected Letters: 1820-1825
“And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the soul of each, and God of all?”
“Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth Of all sweet sounds the life and element!”
“Farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.”
“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.”
Source: Biographia Literaria, Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions
“During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.”
Source: Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions
“Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from, as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“A wild rose roofs the ruined shed, And that and summer well agree.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Of no agenor 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.”
“Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetry, Plays, Literary Essays, Lectures, Autobiography and Letters (Classic Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of the English poet, literary critic and philosopher, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems and Biographia Literaria
“The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”
Source: Biographia Literaria: Top Biography
“The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“I am never very forward in offering spiritual consolation to any one in distress or disease. I believe that such resources, to be of any service, must be self-evolved in the first instance. I am something of the Quaker's mind in this, and am inclined to wait for the spirit.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“But metre itself implies a passion , i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader.”
Source: Imagination in Coleridge
“Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.”
Source: The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Complete in One Volume
“I stood in unimaginable trance And agony that cannot be remembered.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.”
Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“The blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook, Hope's gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“O let me be awake, my God! Or let me sleep alway.”
“Hamlet 's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness of Impression. Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a life of it's own, & that we are all one Life.”
Source: Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Major Works
“The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty, and the majesty That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and watery depths, all these have vanished; They live no longer in the faith of reason.”
Source: The Maid of Oreleans; The Bride of Messina; Wilhelm Tell; Demetrius; The Piccolomini; The Death of Wallenstein; Wallenstein's Camp
“The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Seldom can philosophic genius be more usefully employed than in thus rescuing admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.”
Source: Aids to reflection, in the formation of a manly character ... illustrated by select passages ... especially from Archbishop Leighton ... First American, from the first London edition ... Together with a preliminary essay, and additional notes, by James Marsh
“Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.”
Source: Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions
“The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Dryden 's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Moral obligation is to me so very strong a Stimulant, that in 9 cases out of ten it acts as a Narcotic. The Blow that should rouse, stuns me.”
Source: Unpublished letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: including certain letters republished from original sources
“Bells, the poor man's only music.”
“Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.”
Source: Works
“Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it.”
Source: Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Man Behind The Lyrics (Illustrated Edition): Autobiographical Works (Memoirs, Complete Letters, Literary Introspection, Thoughts and Notes on Poetry); Including Extensive Biographies and Studies on S. T. Coleridge
“Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses , each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.”
Source: Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Man Behind The Lyrics (Illustrated Edition): Autobiographical Works (Memoirs, Complete Letters, Literary Introspection, Thoughts and Notes on Poetry); Including Extensive Biographies and Studies on S. T. Coleridge
