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Quotes by William Wordsworth

A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.
– William Wordsworth
A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual all-in-all!
– William Wordsworth
But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night, shall lead thee to thy grave.
– William Wordsworth
Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.
– William Wordsworth
Faith is a passionate intuition.
– William Wordsworth
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
– William Wordsworth
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
– William Wordsworth
For by superior energies; more strict affiance in each other; faith more firm in their unhallowed principles, the bad have fairly earned a victory over the weak, the vacillating, inconsistent good.
– William Wordsworth
For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
– William Wordsworth
Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore of nicely-calculated less or more.
– William Wordsworth
Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.
– William Wordsworth
Happier of happy though I be, like them I cannot take possession of the sky, mount with a thoughtless impulse, and wheel there, one of a mighty multitude whose way and motion is a harmony and dance magnificent.
– William Wordsworth
Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.
– William Wordsworth
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.
– William Wordsworth
How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.
– William Wordsworth
Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams.
– William Wordsworth
I traveled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; nor England! did I know till then what love I bore to thee.
– William Wordsworth
In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.
– William Wordsworth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.
– William Wordsworth
Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.
– William Wordsworth
Lost in a gloom of uninspired research.
– William Wordsworth
Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.
– William Wordsworth
Neither evil tongues, rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men, nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life, shall e'er prevail against us.
– William Wordsworth
No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees; rolled around in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.
– William Wordsworth
Not Chaos, not the darkest pit of lowest Erebus, nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out by help of dreams - can breed such fear and awe as fall upon us often when we look into our Minds, into the Mind of Man.
– William Wordsworth
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
– William Wordsworth
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come.
– William Wordsworth
Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
– William Wordsworth
Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more.
– William Wordsworth
She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love.
– William Wordsworth
She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.
– William Wordsworth
Small service is true service, while it lasts.
– William Wordsworth
That blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened.
– William Wordsworth
The Child is the father of the Man.
– William Wordsworth
The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.
– William Wordsworth
The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.
– William Wordsworth
The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.
– William Wordsworth
The ocean is a mighty harmonist.
– William Wordsworth
The thought of our past years in me doth breed perpetual benedictions.
– William Wordsworth
This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
– William Wordsworth
To begin, begin.
– William Wordsworth
To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
– William Wordsworth
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
– William Wordsworth
What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.
– William Wordsworth
Whether we be young or old,Our destiny, our being's heart and home,Is with infinitude, and only there;With hope it is, hope that can never die,Effort and expectation, and desire,And something evermore about to be.
– William Wordsworth
Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.
– William Wordsworth
With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.
– William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
– William Wordsworth
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
– William Wordsworth
Wisdom and spirit of the Universe!
Thou soul is the eternity of thought!
That giv'st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! Not in vain
By day or star-light thus from by first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul,
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
– William Wordsworth
She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleam'd upon my sight;
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament.
– William Wordsworth
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be not forever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
Strength in what remains behind,
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be,
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of Human suffering,
In the faith that looks through death
In years that bring philophic mind.
– William Wordsworth
When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.
– William Wordsworth
The child is father of the man.
– William Wordsworth
The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.
– William Wordsworth
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity.
– William Wordsworth
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.
– William Wordsworth
I listened, motionless and still And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.
– William Wordsworth