Quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

And now there came both mist and snow,And it grew wondrous cold:And ice, mast-high, came floating by,As green as emerald.

Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,And Hope without an object cannot live.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

The imagination… that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.

In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea.So twice five miles of fertile groundWith walls and towers were girdled round.

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,That dances as often as dance it can.

And what if all of animated natureBe but organic harps diversely fram'd,That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweepsPlastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,At once the Soul of each, and God of All?

The secondary [imagination]… dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

The Wedding Guest here beat his breast,For he heard the loud bassoon.

Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;Friendship is a sheltering tree.

The hornèd Moon, with one bright starWithin the nether tip.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

The last speech [Iago's soliloquy], the motivehunting of a motiveless malignity—how awful!

'Tis a month before the month of May,And the Spring comes slowly up this way.

I pass, like night, from land to land;I have strange power of speech;That moment that his face I see,I know the man that must hear me:To him my tale I teach.

That saints will aid if men will call:For the blue sky bends over all!

O the one life within us and abroad,Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere—Methinks, it should have been impossibleNot to love all things in a world so filled.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

He holds him with his glittering eye—The Wedding Guest stood still,And listens like a three years' child:The Mariner hath his will.

A noise like of a hidden brookIn the leafy month of June,That to the sleeping woods all nightSingeth a quiet tune.

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

It was a miracle of rare device,A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!