Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridgewas an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases,...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 October 1772
Samuel Taylor Coleridge quotes about
I never knew a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart somewhere or other.
Where virtue is, sensibility is the ornament and becoming attire of virtue. On certain occasions it may almost be said to become virtue. But sensibility and all the amiable qualities may likewise become, and too often have become, the panders of vice and the instruments of seduction.
And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.
No sound is dissonant which tells of life.
If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil . He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.
It has been observed before that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's spirit.
Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power.
Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.
Memory, bosom-spring of joy.
Metaphysics,--the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being.
Motives are symptoms of weakness, and supplements for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best-balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility no less than prudence prescribes deliberation.
Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? Can danger lurk within a kiss?
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.
Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge...