Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Wisdom, Coleridge suggests, isn’t a mystical gift so much as a social label slapped onto a rare kind of practicality. The jab is subtle: “the world” doesn’t call you wise because you’ve touched transcendence; it calls you wise because you manage to do the obvious when most people don’t. That framing quietly demotes wisdom from sacred status to an outcome of distribution. Common sense is abundant in theory, scarce in practice, and the gap between the two is where reputation gets made.

The line works because it reverses our preferred mythology. We like wisdom to sound like a mountain-top revelation, not like showing up on time, seeing incentives clearly, and refusing to be dazzled by nonsense. Coleridge’s phrasing turns “common” into a provocation: if sense were truly common, no one would need a special word for its exceptional appearance. “In an uncommon degree” is doing all the labor, pointing to a world of cognitive vanity, groupthink, and fashionable error where the simplest judgement requires unusual nerve.

Context matters: Coleridge lived through revolution, reaction, and the early churn of industrial modernity, when public opinion and print culture started to feel like forces of nature. A Romantic poet, he’s often associated with imagination and the sublime, yet here he’s suspicious of grand abstractions. The subtext is almost editorial: in noisy eras, sanity looks like genius. Wisdom becomes less about having new ideas than about resisting bad ones, steadily, when the crowd makes that steadiness feel eccentric.