Top 100 Coleridge's Quotes
#1. Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread. -
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.
Mary Shelley
#2. No poet is required to write in stanzas, or indeed in regular forms at all. Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode' has a rhyme scheme and sequence of long and short lines that goes without regular pattern, following the mood and whim of the poet. Such a form is known as an irregular ode.
James Fenton
#3. Ere I was old? Ah woeful Ere,
Which tells me, Youth's no longer here!
O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
'Tis known that Thou and I were one,
I'll think it but a fond conceit
It cannot be that Thou art gone!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#4. Fellows of colleges in the universities are in one sense the recipients of alms, because they receive funds which originally were of an eleemosynary character.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#5. For compassion a human heart suffices, but for full and adequate sympathy, with joy, an angel's only.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#6. Christmas Eve I saw a stable, low and very bare, A little child in a manger. The oxen knew Him, had Him in their care, To men He was a stranger, The safety of the world was lying there, And the world's danger.
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
#7. About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#8. When thieves come, I bark; when gallants, I am still - So perform both my master's and mistress's will.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#9. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#10. On this hapless earth There 's small sincerity of mirth, And laughter oft is but an art To drown the outcry of the heart.
Hartley Coleridge
#11. June brings tulips, lilies, roses,
Fills the children's hands with posies.
Sara Coleridge
#14. Why aren't more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books aren't within everybody's reach.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#16. Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream!
I turn from you, and listen to the wind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#18. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#20. Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#21. 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
#22. The beauty of the picture is an abiding concrete of the painter's vision.
Hartley Coleridge
#23. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#24. It [is] very unfair to influence a child's mind by inculcating any opinions before it [has] come to years of discretion to choose for itself.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#25. Heart-chilling superstition! thou canst glaze even Pity's eye with her own frozen tear.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#26. Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#28. 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
#29. Where true Love burns Desire is Love's pure flame;
It is the reflex of our earthly frame,
That takes its meaning from the nobler part,
And but translates the language of the heart.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#30. Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#31. A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#33. To know, to esteem, to love,-and then to part,
Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#34. Mr. Mum's Rudesheimer
And the church of St. Geryon
Are the two things alone
That deserve to be known
In the body-and-soul-stinking town of Cologne.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#35. Coleridge, who when at Christ's Hospital was ambitious to be a shoemaker's apprentice, was right when he declared that shoemakers had given to the world a larger number of eminent men than any other handicraft.
George Smith
#37. Dryden 's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#38. Here's Coleridge, in 1804, when he turned thirty-two: 'Yesterday was my Birth Day. So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month. - O Sorrow and Shame ... I have done nothing!
Anthony Doerr
#39. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Never till this day Did life disturb the dense eternity Of joyless quiet; never skylark's song, Or storm-bird's prescient scream, or eaglet's cry, Made vital the gross fog. The very light Is but an alien that can find no welcome
Hartley Coleridge
#46. A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#47. Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#49. To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#50. The blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook, Hope's gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#51. Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee,Nor Nature, nor that deep man's Nature, Art?Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee,Thou little heart?
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
#52. Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
Oh the joys that came down shower-like,
Of friendship, love, and liberty,
Ere I was old!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#53. Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
Matthew Arnold
#54. I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble distilled, and as it were super-substantiated.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#55. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#56. 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.
- (1772-1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#58. Oh, where is man That mortal god, that hath no mortal kin Or like on earth? Shall Nature's orator The interpreter of all her mystic strains Shall he be mute in Nature's jubilee?
Hartley Coleridge
#59. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#60. Coleridge saw the active mind as one way in which human beings were made in God's image:
Mark J.P. Wolf
#61. Religious bigotry is a dull fire - hot enough to roast an ox, but with no lambent, luminous flame shooting up from it.
Sara Coleridge
#63. In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.
Jorge Luis Borges
#64. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#65. Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#66. On Pilgrim's Progress: I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#68. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#69. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#73. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#75. Religion is the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It alone will gentilize, if unmixed with cant.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#76. The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#77. The death of my mother permanently affects my happiness, more even than I should have anticipated, though I always knew that I must feel the separation at first as a severe wrench. But I did not apprehend, during her life, to what a degree she prevented me from feeling heart-solitude ...
Sara Coleridge
#78. Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#80. An orphan's curse would drag to hell, a spirit from on high; but oh! more horrible than that, is a curse in a dead man's eye!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#81. I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language-religion-government-blood-identity in these makes men of one country.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#82. Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action - that the end will sanction any means.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#83. 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
#86. Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro'me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#87. It is the duty of the Judge in criminal trials to take care that the verdict of the jury is not founded upon any evidence except that which the law allows.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#88. General principles ... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#90. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#91. O pure of heart! Thou needest not ask of me what this strong music in the soul may be!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#92. Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy.
George Gordon Byron
#93. The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#94. The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs! what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#95. Thou breeze, That mak'st an organ of the mighty sea, Obedient to thy wilful phantasies, Provoke him not to scorn; but soft and low, As pious maid awakes her aged sire, On tiptoe stealing, whisper in his ear The tidings of the young god's victory.
Hartley Coleridge
#96. The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#97. April brings the primrose sweet, / Scatters daisies at our feet.
Sara Coleridge
#98. A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#100. The devil is not, indeed, perfectly humorous, but that is only because he is the extreme of all humor.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
