Top 100 Quotes About Coleridge
#1. 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
#2. Coleridge saw the active mind as one way in which human beings were made in God's image:
Mark J.P. Wolf
#3. Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
Matthew Arnold
#4. 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
#5. I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons.
Billy Collins
#6. Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.
Elena Ferrante
#7. 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
#8. I prefer to think of faith, as Coleridge says of poetry, not as the taking up of belief but as "the willing suspension of disbelief" ... a willingness to be open, to explore, to investigate.
Sharon Salzberg
#9. Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source, The rapt one, of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth.
William Wordsworth
#10. Friendship is a sheltering tree." Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Nina Post
#11. Coleridge declares that a man cannot have a good conscience who refuses apple dumplings, and I confess that I am of the same opinion.
Charles Lamb
#12. I kind of got inspired by [William] Wordsworth and [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge - I went the old traditional way of finding inspiration, I guess ...
Eliot Paulina Sumner
#13. Some wishes crossed my mind and dimly cheered it, And one or two poor melancholy pleasures, Each in the pale unwarming light of hope, Silvering its flimsy wing, flew silent by - Moths in the moonbeam!' COLERIDGE.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#14. Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.
Charles Lamb
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Something which, for want of a more definite term at present, I must be permitted to be called queer; but which Mr. Coleridge would have called mystical, Mr. Kant pantheistical, Mr. Carlyle twistical, and Mr. Emerson hyperquizzitistical.
Edgar Allan Poe
#18. Coleridge perceived as no one else had done that lesbianism could be a source of the sublime.
Andrew Elfenbein
#19. The Romantic poets were the prototype ramblers, and I've often found myself following in their footsteps - although perhaps not all of their footsteps since a typical walk for Samuel T. Coleridge might last two days and cover 145km.
Arthur Smith
#20. It is a pity that no one in Paris bothered to quote Coleridge, who wrote, long before cubism, that the true poet is able to reduce 'succession to an instant.' Simultaneity in this sense is the property of all great poetry.
LeRoy C. Breunig
#21. Water inflated the belly
Of Hart Crane, and of Shelley.
Coleridge was a dope.
Southwell died on a rope.
Roy Fuller
#22. As Coleridge said, "We receive but what we give." The happy life is a life of continual generosity in which we go out to meet and acclaim the world.
Gerald Brenan
#23. 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
#24. Coleridge wrote, Dreams are no shadows, but the very substances and calamities of my life.
Sidney Sheldon
#25. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#26. Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
Stevie Smith
#27. 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
#28. So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge.
George Saintsbury
#29. 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 the flower in your hand? - SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Wayne W. Dyer
#30. 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
#31. Religion is the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It alone will gentilize, if unmixed with cant.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#33. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#40. On Pilgrim's Progress: I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#41. 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
#42. 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
#44. Religious bigotry is a dull fire - hot enough to roast an ox, but with no lambent, luminous flame shooting up from it.
Sara Coleridge
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. The devil is not, indeed, perfectly humorous, but that is only because he is the extreme of all humor.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#54. 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
#55. April brings the primrose sweet, / Scatters daisies at our feet.
Sara Coleridge
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. O pure of heart! Thou needest not ask of me what this strong music in the soul may be!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. General principles ... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#64. 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
#65. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#75. 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
#76. God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, you piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#77. A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#78. What! Did Sir W[alter] R[aleigh] believe that a male and female ounce (and, if so, why not two tigers and lions, etc?) would have produced, in a course of generations, a cat, or a cat a lion? This is Darwinizing with a vengeance.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#79. Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#80. To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#82. 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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#83. Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#85. Then all the charm
Is broken
all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#87. Go your way. Forget Prometheus, And all the woe that he is doom'd to bear; By his own choice this vile estate preferring To ignorant bliss and unfelt slavery.
Hartley Coleridge
#89. I have a strong opinion that a genuine love of books is one of the greatest blessings of life for man and woman ...
Sara Coleridge
#90. Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#91. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#94. What if you slept?
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 you hand
Ah, what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#95. 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
#98. Laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
