“Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.”
“Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.”
“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
“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
“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 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
“The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.”
Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“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
“Bells, the poor man's only music.”
“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
“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
“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.”
“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
“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.”
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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.”
“As there is much beast and some devil in man, so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated)
“Oh, the difficulty of fixing the attention of men on the world within them!”
“The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to call forth noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed.”
“There is no such thing as a worthless book though there are some far worse than worthless; no book that is not worth preserving, if its existence may be tolerated; as there may be some men whom it may be proper to hang, but none should be suffered to starve.”
“Women have their heads in their hearts. Man seems to have been destined for a superior being; as things are, I think women generally better creatures than men. They have weaker appetites and weaker intellects but much stronger affections. A man with a bad heart has been sometimes saved by a strong head; but a corrupt woman is lost forever.”
Source: Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Table Talk (2 v.)
“A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”
Source: Golden Hours with Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“What is one man's gain is another's loss.”
“The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it furnished him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, armaments, or playwiths but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing.”
“Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.”
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 poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity.”
“The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer.”
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.”
“Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation”
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
“Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.”
“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.”
“He went like one that hath been stunn'd, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man He rose the morrow morn.”
“The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.”
Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.”
“Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.”
“No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.”
“I understood that you would take the Human Race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope's Essay on Man, [Erasmus] Darwin, and all the countless Believers-even (strange to say) among Xtians-of Man's having progressed from an Ouran Outang state-so contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay, to all Possibility-to have affirmed a Fall in some sense.”
Source: Lectures 1818-1819 on the history of philosophy
“I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language-religion-government-blood-identity in these makes men of one country.”
Source: Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Table Talk (2 v.)
“The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigor of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
“If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.”
Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions
