12 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes on Philosophy

Samuel Taylor Coleridge quotes on philosophy

18. Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

21. The imagination...that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.

29. 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?

107. During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.

116. No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

124. Schiller has the material sublime.

127. The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.

139. He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light, otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find them; and if you could, you could not arrange them.

161. I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.

166. Metaphisics is a word that you, my dear Sir! are no great friend to / but yet you will agree, that a great Poet must be, implicite if not explicite, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact / for all sounds, & all forms of human nature he must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent Desart, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest - ; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child.

173. Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cuttings, integra et in toto! She is sure to get the better of Lady MIND in the long run, and to take her revenge too - transforms our To Day into a Canvass dead-colored to receive the dull featureless Portait of Yesterday.

175. And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But, like a hawk encumber'd with his hood, Explaining metaphysics to the nation - I wish he would explain his Explanation.