Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.

Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.

Truth I pursued,as Fancy sketch'd the way,
And wiser men than I went worse astray.

Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,

And may this storm be but a mountain-birth,

May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,

Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!

With light heart may she rise,

Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,

Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;

To her may all things live, from pole to pole,

Their life the eddying of her living soul!

O simple spirit, guided from above,

Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,

Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.

But I do not doubt that it is beneficial sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as in a picture, the image of a grander and better world; for if the mind grows used to the trivia of daily life, it may dwindle too much and decline altogether into worthless thoughts.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us He made and loveth all. The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest Turned from the bridegroom's door.

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick.

In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

O lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live.

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.

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream!
I turn from you, and listen to the wind.

Tho' veiled in spires of myrtle wreath,
Love is a sword that cuts its sheath,
And thro' the clefts, itself has made,
We spy the flashes of the Blade!

But thro' the clefts, itself has made,
We likewise see Love's flashing blade,
By rust consumed or snapt in twain:
And only Hilt and Stump remain.

- Song

For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!