S T Coleridge Quotes & Sayings

Friendship is a sheltering tree." Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Nina Post

We have the same symptoms as tuberculosis, especially in the eyes of the Romantic Poets. Pale, tired, coughing up blood."
"That's romantic?"
I had to smile. "Romantic with a capital 'R.' You know, like Byron and Coleridge."
He gave a mock shudder. "Please, stop. I barely passed English Lit."
I snorted. "I didn't have that option. One of my aunts took Byron as a lover."
"Get out."
"Seriously. It makes Lucy insanely jealous."
"That girl is . . ."
"My best friend," I filled in sternly.
"I was only going to say she's unique. — Alyxandra Harvey

Stimulate the heart to love and the mind to be early accurate, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord, and all vices will be thrown out. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A great mind must be androgynous. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The other gift - a book of poems, called, "The Cowardly Morning" - Waner put on Corinne's desk at the office, with a note saying, "This man is Coleridge and Blake and Rilke all in one, and more."
She didn't pick up the book again until she was in bed, late that night.
[...]
The first poem was the title poem. This time Corinne read it through aloud. But still she didn't hear it. She read it through a third time, and heard some of it. She read it through a fourth time, and heard all of it. It was the poem containing the lines:
'Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all foliage underground.'
As though it might be best to look immediately for shelter, Corinne had to put the book down. At any moment the apartment building seemed liable to lose its balance and topple across Fifth Avenue into Central Park. She waited. Gradually the deluge of truth and beauty abated.
- The Inverted Forest (1947) — J.D. Salinger

EPITAPH ON AN INFANT Ere Sin could blight or Sorrow fade, Death came with friendly care: The opening Bud to Heaven convey'd, And bade it blossom there. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Why aren't more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books aren't within everybody's reach. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I think it was Coleridge who said everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. People who can't stand Aristotle's endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato's soaring generalities. People who can't stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle. — Robert M. Pirsig

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.' Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: 'People react to fear, not love. They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true.' That principle, which guided the late president's political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Marketers of products and services ranging from car alarms to TV news programs have taken it to heart as well.

The short answer to why Americans harbor so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes. — Barry Glassner

A spring of love gush'd from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He holds him with his glittering eye, And listens like a three years' child. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Never can true courage dwell with them, Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look At their own vices. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He knows well the evening star, and once when he awoke, in a most distressful mood (some inward pain had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream), I hurried with him to our orchard plot, and he beheld the moon, and hushed at once. Suspends his sobs and laughs most silently. While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears, did glitter in the yellow moonbeam. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Parents and children cannot be to each other, as husbands with wives and wives with husbands. Nature has separated them by an almost impassable barrier of time; the mind and the heart are in quite a different state at fifteen and forty. — Sara Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sonnet: To the River Otter

Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!
How many various-fated years have passed,
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
Ah! that once more I were a careless child! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye, and what then? - S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetae — Clive Barker

While much recent historicist criticism has assumed early nineteenth-century readers attuned to subtle ideological nuances in poetry, actual responses from readers often come closer to clulessness ... It is no surprise that no one understood Blake, but other poets fared not much better ... Coleridge's 'Christabel' was 'the standing enigma which puzzles the curiosity of literary circles. What is it all about?', while another reviewer asked about Shelley, 'What, in the name of wonder on one side, and of common sense on the other, is the meaning of this metaphysical rhapsody about the unbinding of Prometheus?'. Even Keats was condemned for 'his frequent obscurity and confusion of language' and his 'unintelligible quaintness'. Byron, never to be outdone, boasted in 'Don Juan' that not only did he not understand many of his fellow poets, he did not understand himself either: 'I don't pretend that I quite understand / My own meaning when I would be very fine.' ... — Andrew Elfenbein

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel-dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, alone. Certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners. — 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

I ago's soliloquy
the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity
how awful it is! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony. — 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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

infancy presents body and spirit in unity — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me any my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Commemoration of Brooke Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, Teacher, 1901 Be not afraid to pray ... to pray is right. Pray if thou canst with hope; but ever pray Though hope be weak, or sick with long delay. Whatever is good to wish, ask that of heaven; But if for any wish thou darest not pray, Then pray to God to cast that wish away. — Hartley 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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

It is far more important the law should be administered with absolute integrity, than that in this case or in that the law should be a good law or a bad one. — John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge