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The collection / 270 fragments

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01c. 1803 AD
In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstances of their universal admission. Extremes meet. Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge / quote
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03c. 1803 AD
I am especially pleased with their freundin (the German word meaning a female friend), which unlike the amica of the Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now I know it will be said that a friend is already something more than a friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a female; but this I deny—in that sense at least in which the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a sister—nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge / quote
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04c. 1803 AD
O Lady! We receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah, from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge / quote
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05c. 1803 AD
Say, mysterious Earth! O say, great mother and goddess, Was it not well with thee then, when first thy lap was ungirdled, Thy lap to the genial Heaven, the day that he wooed thee and won thee!... Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth from the mighty embracement. Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impelled by thousand-fold instincts. Filled, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on their channels; Laughed on their shores the wide seas; the yearning ocean swelled upward; Young life lowed through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing mountains, Wandered bleating in valleys, and warbled on blossoming branches.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge / quote
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09c. 1803 AD
There is the love of the good for the good’s sake, and the love of the truth for the truth’s sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good’s sake; but very few, indeed—and scarcely one woman—love the truth for the truth’s sake. Yet without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of the persecution of the truth—the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical is given only to those who love both sincerely and without any foreign ends.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge / quote
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10c. 1803 AD
Let a man be once fully persuaded that there is no difference between the two positions, “The Bible contains the religion revealed by God,” and “Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God”; and that whatever can be said of the Bible, collectively taken, may and must be said of each and every sentence of the Bible, taken for and by itself,—and I no longer wonder at these paradoxes. I only object to the inconsistency of those who profess the same belief, and yet affect to look down with a contemptuous or compassionate smile on John Wesley for rejecting the Copernican system as incompatible therewith; or who exclaim, “Wonderful!” when they hear that Sir Matthew Hale sent a crazy old woman to the gallows in honour of the Witch of Endor.... I challenge these divines and their adherents to establish the compatibility of a belief in the modern astronomy and natural philosophy with their and Wesley’s doctrine respecting the inspired Scriptures.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge / quote
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17c. 1803 AD
God’s altar grasping with an eager hand, Fear, the wild-visaged, pale, eye-starting wretch, Sure-refuged, hears his hot-pursuing fiends Yell at vain distance. Soon refreshed from Heaven, He calms the throb and tempest of his heart, His countenance settles; a soft solemn bliss Swims in his eye—his swimming eye upraised: And faith’s whole armour glitters on his limbs! And thus transfigured with a dreadless awe, A solemn hush of soul, meek he beholds All things of terrible seeming.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge / quote
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19c. 1803 AD
Gently I took that which ungently came, And without scorn forgave:—Do thou the same. A wrong done to thee think a cat’s eye spark, Thou wouldest not see, were not thine own heart dark. Thine own keen sense of wrong that thirsts for sin, Fear that—the spark self-kindled from within, Which blown upon will blind thee with its glare, Or smother’d stifle thee with noisome air. Clap on the extinguisher, pull up the blinds, And soon the ventilated spirit finds Its natural daylight. If a foe have kenn’d, Or worse than foe, an alienated friend, A rib of dry rot in thy ship’s stout side, Think it God’s message, and in humble pride With heart of oak replace it;—thine the gains— Give him the rotten timber for his pains!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge / quote
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