Remarks by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“The secondary imagination dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.”

Describing the secondary imagination as a vital, unifying power · Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII

“The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost.”

Observing how naming and party identity can stall reform · Table Talk, 21 July 1827

“No state can be such properly, which is not self-subsistent at least; for no state that is not so, is essentially independent.”

Defining true statehood by economic and political self-sufficiency · Table Talk, 20 June 1834

“How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakespeare!”

Contrasting the personal presence of Chaucer with the elusiveness of Shakespeare · Table Talk, 15 March 1834

“I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age.”

Expressing late-life affection for Chaucer's cheerful spirit · Table Talk, 15 March 1834

“The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false.”

Objecting to the practice of oath-taking on moral grounds · Table Talk, 25 May 1830

“You may depend upon it, the more oath-taking the more lying generally among the people.”

Scepticism toward the efficacy of frequent oaths · Table Talk, 25 May 1830

“A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head.”

Warning against rigid maxims that look only backward · Table Talk, 24 June 1827

“Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.”

A moderating observation on human character · Table Talk, 19 April 1830

“The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast.”

Praising the poetic character of the Book of Job · Table Talk, 9 May 1830

“Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.”

Locating the origin of the sublime in Hebrew literature · Table Talk, 25 July 1832

“When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad.”

Defining madness as the collapse of the boundary between thought and reality · Table Talk, 25 July 1832

“Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.”

Claiming the Bible as a safeguard of literary dignity · Table Talk, 14 June 1830

“Shakespeare is the Spinosistic deity — an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience.”

Contrasting the creative modes of Shakespeare and Milton · Table Talk, 12 May 1830

“Kean is original; but he copies from himself. To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”

A vivid critical image of Edmund Kean's acting style · Table Talk, 17 April 1823

“Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from, as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets.”

A sharp analogy for the anxiety of the literary thief · Table Talk, 4 January 1823

“A mother is a mother still; the holiest thing alive.”

An unadorned affirmation of maternal sanctity · The Friend, No. 6, 1809

“I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved.”

Lamenting the neglect of imagination even in the pursuit of pure truth · Letter to his brother, 1791

“Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.”

Distinguishing the emotional range of humour from that of wit · Letter to a friend, c. 1821

“It is a flattening Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.”

Observing how experience can dampen the impulse to speech · Letter to James Gillman, 9 October 1825

“Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp.”

A vivid personification of nature's resilience and cunning · Letter to James Gillman, 9 October 1825

“Metaphysics is a word that you, my dear Sir, are no great friend to; but yet you will agree, that a great Poet must be, implicitly if not explicitly, a profound Metaphysician.”

Reaffirming the necessity of philosophical depth for poetic greatness · Letter to William Sotheby, 13 July 1802

“I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.”

An energetic declaration of intellectual appetite · Letter to Sir Humphry Davy, 15 July 1800

“Among the aids to reflection, place the following maxim prominent: let distinctness in expression advance side by side with distinction in thought.”

Linking clarity of language to clarity of thought · Aids to Reflection, Prudential Aphorisms

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