William Wordsworth Quotes

411 Sourced Quotes

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
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

William Wordsworth
Rapine, avarice, expense
This is idolatry; and these we adore:
Plain living and high thinking are no more:
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws.

William Wordsworth
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

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
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

William Wordsworth
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw.

William Wordsworth
Man now presides
In power, where once he trembled in his weakness;
Science advances with gigantic strides;
But are we aught enriched in love and meekness?

William Wordsworth
Full twenty times was Peter feared,
For once that Peter was respected.

William Wordsworth
Oft on the dappled turf at ease
I sit, and play with similes,
Loose types of things through all degrees.

William Wordsworth
And we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.

William Wordsworth
Yet tears to human suffering are due;
And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown
Are mourned by man, and not by man alone.

William Wordsworth
A cheerful life is what the Muses love,
A soaring spirit is their prime delight.

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
She was a Phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament;
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair,
Like twilights too her dusky hair,
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn.

William Wordsworth
All men feel something of an honorable bigotry for the objects which have long continued to please them.

William Wordsworth
Of all that is most beauteous, imaged there
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams.

William Wordsworth
Yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round!

William Wordsworth
A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays And confident tomorrows.

William Wordsworth
Alas! how little can a moment show
Of an eye where feeling plays
In ten thousand dewy rays:
A face o'er which a thousand shadows go!

William Wordsworth
Mark the babe not long accustomed to this breathing world; One that hath barely learned to shape a smile, though yet irrational of soul, to grasp with tiny finger - to let fall a tear; And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves, To stretch his limbs, becoming, as might seem. The outward functions of intelligent man.

William Wordsworth
Men who can hear the Decalogue, and feel
To self-reproach.

William Wordsworth
But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.

William Wordsworth
Be mild, and cleave to gentle things, thy glory and thy happiness be there.

William Wordsworth
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery.

William Wordsworth
Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares!—
The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.

William Wordsworth
What is pride? A whizzing rocket
That would emulate a star.

William Wordsworth
All shod with steel
We hissed along the polished ice, in games
Confederate.

William Wordsworth
There is a luxury in self-dispraise;
And inward self-disparagement affords
To meditative spleen a grateful feast.

William Wordsworth
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream.

William Wordsworth