Quotes About Coleridge

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.

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.

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?

those who care about literature and mind must know the Hebrew Bible, Donne, Sterne and Jane Austen, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Proust and Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and (of course) Shakespeare, to start.

Oh, you know, fantasy I've always found a word I really don't care for. Fantasy always strikes me as something that doesn't have any reality because it's completely irresponsible. Anything that is fantastic I don't think is really terribly interesting. What's the Coleridge distinction between imagination and - is it fantasy? I don't think that's the word. Anyway, you know, one is meaningful and one isn't.

It was as if they had suddenly emerged into infinity. They had an ocean to themselves, a desolate, hostile vastness. Shackleton thought of the lines of Coleridge: Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea.

Religion is the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It alone will gentilize, if unmixed with cant.

Coleridge perceived as no one else had done that lesbianism could be a source of the sublime.

Only Coleridge was philosophically brilliant enough to understand that their declarations about nature—its immortality, its beauty and truth—needed to rest upon the supernatural, "a kind of common sensorium"—as he called Jesus Christ—"the total Idea that modifies all thoughts.

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.

Coleridge wrote, "Dreams are no shadows, but the very substances and calamities of my life.

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.

The nightmare Life-in-Death was she.

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!

He went like one that hath been stunn'd, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man He rose the morrow morn.

It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse that distinguishes in order to divide.

The New Héloise in the field of sentiment and of the relation of the sexes, The Social Contract In political theory, and Émile in matters of education, were books whose influence upon Coleridge's generation it would be hard to estimate

The reaction against utilitarianism was a second romanticism, in which the fight against social injustice and the opposition to the actual theories of the "dismal science" played a much smaller part than the urge to escape from the present, whose problems the anti-utilitarians had no ability and no desire to solve, into the irrarionalism of Burke, Coleridge, and German romanticism.

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

The two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination.

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

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

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

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