“The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise. Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where "I admire" is but a synonyme for "I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it ," is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!”
Source: Letters, conversations, and recollections [ed. by T.Allsop].
“The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation.”
“Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain.”
Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Truths ... are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.”
Source: Coleridge's Aids to reflection: with the author's last corrections
“It has been observed before that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's spirit.”
Source: Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions
“The genius of Coleridge is like a sunken treasure ship, and Coleridge a diver too timid and lazy to bring its riches to the surface.”
“The true key to the declension of the Roman empire which is not to be found in all Gibbon 's immense work may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.”
Source: Specimens of the table talk
“Where virtue is, sensibility is the ornament and becoming attire of virtue. On certain occasions it may almost be said to become virtue. But sensibility and all the amiable qualities may likewise become, and too often have become, the panders of vice and the instruments of seduction.”
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
“I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.”
Source: Unpublished Letters
“To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.”
Source: Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions
“Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.”
Source: Opus Maximum
“Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.”
“Clergymen who publish pious frauds in the interest of the church are the orthodox liars of God.”
“The annals of the French Revolution prove that the knowledge of the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the many.... The light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the victims rather than the illuminators of the multitude.”
Source: The Friend: a series of essays ... First American, from the second London edition
“...in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”
Source: Lyrical Ballads
“He prayeth best who loveth best.”
“As long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate.”
Source: Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions
“Fear gives sudden instincts of skill.”
Source: Notebooks
“A Gothic church is a petrified religion.”
“If you wish to assured of the truth of Christianity, try it. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of thy belief.”
“The paternal and filial duties discipline the heart, and prepare it for the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachment encourages, not prevents, universal benevolence.”
Source: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: Lectures, 1795: On Politics and Religion
“For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization science, law; in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting and often leading he way.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Cant is the parrot talk of a profession.”
“Call not that man wretched, who whatever else he suffers as to pain inflicted, or pleasure denied, has a child for whom he hopes and on whom he doats.”
“Health is a great blessing--competence obtained by honorable industry is a great blessing--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but, that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Christianity is within a man, even as he is gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first remembered, tones of her blessed voice.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“In Koln, a town of monks and bones,
And pavement fang'd with murderous stones,
And rags and hags, and hideous wenches,
I counted two-and-seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!
Ye nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks,
The River Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs! what power divine
Shall henceforth whash the river Rhine.”
“In what way, or by what manner of working, God changes a soul from evil to good, how He impregnates the barren rock--the priceless gems and gold--is to the human mind an impenetrable mystery, in all cases alike.”
Source: Aids to Reflection
“The curiosity of an honorable mind willingly rests there, where the love of truth does not urge it farther onward, and the love of its neighbor bids it stop; in other words, it willingly stops at the point where the interests of truth do not beckon it onward, and charity cries, Halt!”
Source: Notes: Theological, Political and Miscellaneous
“Democracy is the healthful lifeblood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The devil is not, indeed, perfectly humorous, but that is only because he is the extreme of all humor.”
Source: Lectures Upon Shakspeare
“A bitter and perplexed "What shall I do?"
Is worse to man than worse necessity.”
Source: The Poetical and Dramatic Works of S. T. Coleridge. With a Life of the Author
“On the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in the course of one day.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Enlist the interests of stern Morality and religious Enthusiasm in the cause of Political Liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon.”
Source: On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each
“Above all things I entreat you to preserve your faith in Christ. It is my wealth in poverty, my joy in sorrow, my peace amid tumult. For all the evil I have committed, my gracious pardon; and for every effort, my exceeding great reward. I have found it to be so. I can smile with pity at the infidel whose vanity makes him dream that I should barter such a blessing for the few subtleties from the school of the cold-blooded sophists.”
“In your intercourse with sects, the sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the Church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is, or may be, collateral to them. Faith is subjective.”
“Never yet did there exist a full faith in the Divine Word (by whom light as well as immortality was brought into the world) which did not expand the intellect, while it purified the heart--which did not multiply the aims and objects of the understanding, while it fixed and simplified those of the desires and passions.”
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
“Falsehood is fire in stubble; it likewise turns all the light stuff around it into its own substance for a moment, one crackling blazing moment, and then dies; and all its converts are scattered in the wind, without place or evidence of their existence, as viewless as the wind which scatters them.”
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 first great requisite is absolute sincerity. Falsehood and disguise are miseries and misery-makers.”
Source: The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“A rogue is a roundabout fool.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.”
Source: Coleridge's Aids to reflection: with the author's last corrections
“A woman's friendship borders more closely on love than man's. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Men of humor are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare.”
“Religion is the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It alone will gentilize, if unmixed with cant.”
“There is no slight danger from general ignorance; and the only choice which Providence has graciously left to a vicious government is either to fall by the people, if they are suffered to become enlightened, or with them, if they are kept enslaved and ignorant.”
Source: The Friend: a series of essays ... First American, from the second London edition
