Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): English poet, literary critic and philosopher. The library holds 166 quotes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, drawn from The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan and other works. The 60 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.
Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand,
By those deep sounds possessed with inward light,
Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey
Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.
Remorse is as the heart in which it grows,
If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews
Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy,
It is the poison tree that, pierced to the inmost,
Weeps only tears of poison.
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions,—the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss, a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of a playful raillery, and the countless other infinitesimals of pleasant thought and feeling.
Like one that on a lonesome 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.
You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilise, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, alone; certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners.
Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place
(Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism,
Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon,
Drops his blue-fring’d lids, and holds them close,
And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven
Cries out, “Where is it?”
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!
Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether.
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.
Youth beholds happiness gleaming in the prospect. Age looks back on the happiness of youth, and, instead of hopes, seeks its enjoyment in the recollection of hope.
The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to call forth noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed.
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.
Democracy is the healthful life-blood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.
Cleverness is a sort of genius for instrumentality. It is the brain of the hand. In literature, cleverness is more frequently accompanied by wit, genius, and sense, than by humor.