Quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or at the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.

A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.

While [Shakespeare] darts himself forth and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood, [Milton] attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own Ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself.

I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,And cried, A sail! a sail!

I counted two and seventy stenches,All well defined, and several stinks.

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloudEnveloping the earth.

Alone, alone, all, all alone;Alone on a wide, wide sea.

O Wedding Guest! This soul hath beenAlone on a wide wide sea:So lonely 'twas, that God himselfScarce seemèd there to be.

The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

About, about, in reel and routThe death fires danced at night.

The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.

The bride hath paced into the hall,Red as a rose is she.

Is this the hill? is this the kirk?Is this mine own countree?

A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.

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.

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.

The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.

As on the driving cloud the shiny Bow, That gracious thing made up of tears and light...

During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.

The moving moon went up the sky,And nowhere did abide;Softly she was going up,And a star or two beside.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.

Love is flower like Friendship is like a sheltering tree.

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—And Winter slumbering in the open air,Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,And cursed me with his eye.