Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher. He was a major poet of the Romantic Movement. He is also noted for his prose works on literature, religion, and the organization of society.
Born in Ottery St. Mary, England, Coleridge was the youngest of ten children. He studied at Cambridge, but he struggled there and dropped out to join the cavalry. He did poorly as a soldier, and his brothers got him a discharge on the grounds of insanity.
Coleridge’s first major poem, “The Eolian Harp,” from Poems on Various Subjects (1796,) announced his unique contribution to the growth of English romanticism.
Coleridge is renowned for his productive friendship with William Wordsworth. They both liked to compose their poetry while walking, so they took long walks together in England’s Lake District throughout their first year of friendship. Coleridge wrote his most famous poems: “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel,” and “Frost at Midnight.” This annus mirabilis (July 1797 to July 1798) culminated in their joint publication of Lyrical Ballads 1798. It marked the start of English Romanticism.
Within a few years, Coleridge’s life began to crumble. He became addicted to opium—he lost his creativity and ruined his friendship with Wordsworth. He spent most of the last 18 years of his life in comparative peace and steady literary activity. He wrote a great book of literary criticism called Biographia Literaria (1817,) and Lay Sermons (1817,) Aids to Reflection (1825,) and The Constitution of Church and State (1829.) However, he failed to complete most of his ambitious projects, including voluminous works on geography, the history of English prose, a translation of Goethe’s Faust, a musical about Adam and Eve, a history of logic, a history of German metaphysics, a study of witchcraft, and an encyclopedia.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Christians, Christianity
The love of indolence is universal, or next to it.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Laziness
For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Eating
A picture is an intermediate something between a thought and a thing.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Painting
Stimulate the heart of love and the mind to be early accurate, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord, and all vices will be thrown out.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Love
The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathises with their just feelings.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Argument
Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Opinions, Opinion
My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart, somewhere or other.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Zeal
The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are—1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and, 3. Hope to all.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Government
A man of maxims only, is like a cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions—the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heart-felt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Joy, Kiss, Things, Kindness, Happiness, Little Things
To restore a common-place truth to its first uncomomn lustre you need only translate it into action. But to do this you must have reflected on its truth.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Truth
I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Tolerance
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Water
I love being superior to myself better than (to) my equals.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In wonder all philosophy began; in wonder it ends; and admiration fills up the interspace.—But the first is the wonder of ignorance; the last is the parent of adoration.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Wonder, Philosophy
How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Vice, Self-Control
No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Humor
Nature never deserts the wise and pure; no plot so narrow, be but nature there; no waste so vacant, but may well employ each faculty of sense, and keep the heart awake to love and beauty!
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Nature
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Friends, Friendship
Thelwall thought it very unfair to influence a child’s mind by inculcating any opinions before it had come to years of discretion to choose for itself.—I showed him my garden, and I told him it was my botanical garden.—“How so?” said he; “it is covered with weeds.”—“O,” I replied, “that is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice.—The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil toward roses and strawberries.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Education
Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Reading
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.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Sincerity
What happiness is, the Bible alone shows clearly and certainly, and point out the way that leads to the attainment of it.—“In Cicero and Plato, and other such writers,” says Augustine, “I meet with many things acutely said, and things that excite a certain warmth of emotions, but in none of them do I find these words, ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Happiness
The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Judaism
Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Style
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Language
Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Wit, Humor
I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language—religion—government—blood—identity in these makes men of one country.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Topics: Nationalism, Nationality, Nations, Nation
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
William Wordsworth English Poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley English Poet
John Dryden English Poet
William Ernest Henley English Poet
William Blake English Poet
Bernard Mandeville British Writer
Philip Larkin English Poet
Christina Rossetti English Poet
Frances Ridley Havergal English Anglican Poet
William Cowper English Anglican Poet