I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Samuel Taylor Coleridge


ART might itself be defined as of a middle quality between a thought and a thing, or as . . . the UNION and RECONCILIATION of that which is NATURE with that which is HUMAN. It is the figured language of thought, and it is distinguished from nature by the unity of all the parts in one thought or IDEA. . . . In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

The more CONSCIOUSNESS in our THOUGHTS and WORDS, and the less in our Impulses and Actions, the better and more healthful the state both of head and heart.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Unless a MAN understands his own HEART, it is impossible that he should have insight into the HEARTS of other MEN.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Hatred of SUPERIORITY is not, alas!, confined to the ignorant. The best informed are most subject to JEALOUSY, and to unfair represematations of new views and doctrines.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Sympathy constitutes FRIENDSHIP, but in LOVE there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Assuredly the great use of History is to acquaint us with the nature of MAN.This end is best answered by the most faithful portrait. But Biography is a collection of portraits. At the same time there must be some mode of grouping and collecting the individuals who are themselves the great landmarks in the Map of HUMAN NATURE.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Sympathy constitutes FRIENDSHIP, but in LOVE there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Assuredly the great use of History is to acquaint us with the nature of MAN.This end is best answered by the most faithful portrait. But Biography is a collection of portraits. At the same time there must be some mode of grouping and collecting the individuals who are themselves the great landmarks in the Map of HUMAN NATURE.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

I not only love TRUTH, but I have a passion for the legitimate investigation of truth, The love of truth conjoined with the keen delight in a strict, skilful, yet impassioned argumentation is my Master passion, and to it are subordinated the love of LIBERTY and all my public feelings, and to it whatever I labour under of Vanity, Ambition, and all my inward impulses.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

A FALL of some sort or other - the creation as it were of the non-absolute - is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of MAN. Without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for HUMAN INSIGHT.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

There is a compact among the learned not to pass beyond acertain limit in SPECULATIVE SCIENCE.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

'Whoever is acquainted with the history of PHILOSOPHY during the last two or three centuries', contended the great poet, 'cannot but admit, that there appears to have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of FREE THOUGHT so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in actual practice, except within this limit.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

The ICE was there, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like VOICES in a swound!
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

A whole essay might be written on the danger of THINKING without IMAGES.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of CREATION.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

The IMAGINATION, then, I consider as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human PERCEPTION, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of CREATION in the infinite I AM. The seconday I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still identiacl with the primary in the kind of its cogency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolces, diffuses, dissipates,in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all event, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, when as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fance is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with and modified by the empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word CHOKE. But especially with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Events and images, the lively and spirit-stirring machinery of the external world, are like light, and air, and moisture, to the seed of the MIND, which would else rot and perish. In all processes of mental evolution the objects of the senses must stimulate the mind; and the mind must in turn assimilate and digest the food which it thus receives from without.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

. . . The spirit of POETRY, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with BEAUTY. It mys embody in order to reveal itself; but a tiring body is of necessity an organized one - and what is organization but the connection of parts of a whole, so that each part is at once end and means! This is no discovery of CRITICISM; it is a necessity of the human MIND - and all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the invention of meter and measured sounds as the vehicle and involucrum of poetry, itself a fellow growth from the same life, even as the bark is to the tree.
No work of the two genres dare want its appropriate FORM; neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so neither can it, be lawless. Forit is even this that constitutes its genius - the power of acting creatively under the laws of its own origination . . . The FORM is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material, aswhen to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The ORGANIC FORM, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its ordered form. Such is the LIFE, and the FORM. NATURE, the prime genial ARTIST, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is especially inexhaustible in forms.Each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror . . .
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Sympathy constitutes FRIENDSHIP, but in LOVE there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Assuredly the great use of History is to acquaint us with the nature of MAN.This end is best answered by the most faithful portrait. But Biography is a collection of portraits. At the same time there must be some mode of grouping and collecting the individuals who are themselves the great landmarks in the Map of HUMAN NATURE.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

I not only love TRUTH but I have a passion for the legitimate investigation of TRUTH. The love of truth conjoined with the keen delight in a strict, skilful, yet impassioned argumentation is my Master Passion, and to it are subordinated the love of LIBERTY and all my public FEELINGS, and to it whatever I labour under of VANITY, AMBITION, and all my inward IMPULSES.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

WISDOM is COMMON SENSE to an UNCOMMON DEGREE
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor