Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Samuel Taylor Coleridge with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
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“Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth;”
Meaning & context
Coleridge summarizes how rumor and hostile speech can turn an old friendship into estrangement even when the original bond was genuine.
Source details
Christabel, Part II, reviewed against the scan-backed 1816 first-edition transcription on Wikisource. The narrator's 'friends in youth / whispering tongues' stanza explains the broken friendship of Sir Leoline and Lord Roland; the passage is Romantic narrative poetry about estrangement, not empirical relationship research.
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“A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted”
Meaning & context
The poem fuses beauty, holiness and menace so that the landscape feels simultaneously sacred, supernatural and dangerous.
Source details
“Kubla Khan,” published with Christabel in 1816 and represented in Project Gutenberg #11101. These are lyric-narrative lines describing the “deep romantic chasm”; the supernatural imagery is poetic invention.
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“He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small;”
Meaning & context
The Mariner’s concluding moral links genuine prayer with love extending beyond human beings to the wider created world.
Source details
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part VII, Project Gutenberg #151. ‘He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small’ belongs to the Mariner's explicitly Christian concluding lesson after his supernatural ordeal, immediately following the parallel line about loving ‘Both man and bird and beast.’ It is fictional poetic speech and religious-moral language, not a neutral scientific, theological or animal-behavior proposition.