Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

Iago’s soliloquy—the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.

Of no age—nor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.

Farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

In Kohln, a town of monks and bones, And pavements fang’d with murderous stones And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches; I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks! Ye Nymphs that reign o’er sewers and sinks, 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?

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

Prose = words in their best order;—poetry = the best words in the best order.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.

Until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora.

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!

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

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced.

A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

On awaking he…instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock.

Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness on the brain.