William Wordsworth Quotes

411 Sourced Quotes

Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how divine a thing
A Woman may be made.

William Wordsworth
As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation.

William Wordsworth
And he is oft the wisest man
Who is not wise at all.

William Wordsworth
Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

William Wordsworth
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

William Wordsworth
Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more.

William Wordsworth
As generations come and go, Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, And feeble, of themselves, decay.

William Wordsworth
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

William Wordsworth
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

William Wordsworth
The feather, whence the pen Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men, Dropped from an angel's wing.

William Wordsworth
Now when the primrose makes a splendid show, And lilies face the March-winds in full blow, And humbler growths as moved with one desire Put on, to welcome spring, their best attire, Poor Robin is yet flowerless; but how gay With his red stalks upon this sunny day!

William Wordsworth
Before us lay a painful road, And guidance have I sought in duteous love From Wisdom's heavenly Father. Hence hath flowed Patience, with trust that, whatsoe'er the way Each takes in this high matter, all may move Cheered with the prospect of a brighter day.

William Wordsworth
Burn all the statutes and their shelves:
They stir us up against our kind;
And worse, against ourselves.

William Wordsworth
Among the dwellings framed by birds In fields or forests with nice care, Is none that with the little wren's In snugness may compare.

William Wordsworth
And when the stream Which overflowed the soul was passed away, A consciousness remained that it had left Deposited upon the silent shore Of memory images and precious thoughts That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.

William Wordsworth
For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was.

William Wordsworth
Careless of books, yet having felt the power
Of Nature, by the gentle agency
Of natural objects, led me on to feel
For passions that were not my own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)
On man, the heart of man, and human life.

William Wordsworth
There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale,
Which to this day stands single, in the midst
Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore.

William Wordsworth
Miss not the occasion; by the forelock take that subtle power, the never-halting time.

William Wordsworth
I should dread to disfigure the beautiful ideal of the memories of illustrious persons with incongruous features, and to sully the imaginative purity of classical works with gross and trivial recollections.

William Wordsworth
But who shall parcel out His intellect by geometric rules, Split like a province into round and square?

William Wordsworth
Small service is true service while it lasts.
Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one:
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.

William Wordsworth
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Enough of science and of art;
Close up these barren leaves.

William Wordsworth
And stepping westward seemed to be
A kind of heavenly destiny.

William Wordsworth
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth