Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes on Knowledge
Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817) and the late Aids to Reflection (1825) introduced the philosophy of Kant, Schelling, and the early German Idealists to the English philosophical public. The crucial distinction between Reason (the higher faculty of intellectual intuition, capable of grasping universal and necessary truths) and Understanding (the lower faculty of generalization from sense-experience that the British empiricist tradition had treated as the whole of cognition) supplies the framework for the parallel distinction between primary Imagination (the human reflection of the divine creative act) and secondary Imagination (the artist's conscious shaping of perceptual material). The framework shaped Victorian theology, the Cambridge Platonist revival, and the broader nineteenth-century English reception of the German philosophical tradition.
Quotes
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Attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
“Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.”
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Attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
“Reason is the power of universal and necessary convictions.”
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Attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
“What I most love in another is what I do not understand.”
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“The dwarf sees farther than the giant when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on.”
No. 15 (November 30, 1809), p. 228 | Cf. Isaac Newton , letter to Robert Hooke (15 February 1676): "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants". -
Attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
“No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.”
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“Epitaph on an Infant", l. 1 (1794)”
Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there . -
“To a Young Ass", l. 1 (1794)”
Poor little foal of an oppressèd race! I love the languid patience of thy face. -
“Blest hour! it was a luxury — to be!”
Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement", l. 43 (1795) -
“Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement", l. 43 (1795)”
Blest hour! it was a luxury — to be! -
“The Eolian Harp ", st. 2 (wr. 1795; pub. 1796)”
O! the one Life, within us and abroad, Which meets all Motion, and becomes its soul, A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light, Rhythm in all Thought, and Joyance every where. -
“The Eolian Harp", st. 3 (wr. 1795; pub. 1796)”
And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversly fram'd, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All?