“II
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear —
O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel how beautiful they are!
III
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”
Source: The Complete Poems
“This is a deep meditation, though the position is capable of the strictest proof,—namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou, and yet not the same. And this, again, is only possible by putting them in opposition as correspondent opposites, or correlatives. In order to this, a something must be affirmed in the one, which is rejected in the other, and this something is the will. I do not will to consider myself as equal to myself, for in the very act of constructing myself I, I take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of comparison, that is, of any application of the will. If then, I minus the will be the thesis; Thou plus will must be the antithesis, but the equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness in order to establish the equality, is the true definition of conscience. But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You no They, These, or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness, and the conditions of experience, it is evident that conscience is the root of all consciousness,—à fortiori, the precondition of all experience,—and that the conscience cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience.”
Source: Aids to Reflection
“That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.”
Source: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?”
Source: The Complete Poems
“Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.”
Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.”
“To be loved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.”
Source: The Complete Poems
“Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.”
“All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrighten'd, 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.
- Work without Hope”
Source: The Complete Poems
“An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.”
Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“Then all the charm
Is broken--all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other.”
Source: Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream
“Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
'Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”
Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems
“O happy things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gished from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware”
Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“The affection of old age is one of the greatest consolations of humanity. I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.”
Source: Coleridge on Shakespeare
“Readers may be divided into four classes: I. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. II. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. III. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. IV. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.”
Source: Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists: With Other Literary Remains of S. T. Coleridge. Volume 1
“Swans sing before they die— 't were no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.”
“There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. And the fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, retain only pure gems.”
“For I was reared
in the great city, pent with cloisters dim,
and saw naught lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! Shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shall thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and al things in himself
Great universal teacher! He shall mold
Thy spirit and by giving , make it ask.”
“The happiest marriage I can picture would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.”
“Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving.”
Source: Biographia Literaria: Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life & Opinions
“The mariners all ‘gan work the ropes,
where they were wont to do:
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools -
We were a ghastly crew.”
“Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.”
“You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it - low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion - and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.”
“The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulders to mount on.”
“Lovely was the death Of Him whose life was Love! Holy with power, He on the thought-benighted Skeptic beamed Manifest Godhead.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad.”
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
“There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.”
Source: The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.”
“Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.”
Source: Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions
“Blest hour! It was a luxury--to be!”
Source: Poetical and Dramatic Works
“Iago's soliloquy - the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity - how awful it is!”
“The more sparingly we make use of nonsense, the better.”
“I believe that obstinacy, or the dread of control and discipline, arises not so much from self-willedness as from a conscious defect of voluntary power; as foolhardiness is not seldom the disguise of conscious timidity.”
“Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe.”
Source: The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With a Life of the Author
“Ancestral voices prophesying war.”
“Remorse is as the heart in which it grows; If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, Weeps only tears of poison.”
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
“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.”
“When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness.”
Source: Letters
“The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.”
Source: Coleridge's Criticism of Shakespeare
“I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”
“Nothing can permanently please, which doesn't contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.”
“The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.”
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
“Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there.”
“Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.”
“Frenchmen are like gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed!”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“Acquaintance many, and conquaintance few, But for inquaintance I know only two - The friend I've wept and the maid I woo.”
Source: The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place; if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.”
Source: Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Major Works
“Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.”
Source: Lectures Upon Shakspeare
“Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It shows the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“We ne'er can be Made happy by compulsion.”
