William Wordsworth Quotes

411 Sourced Quotes

The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.

William Wordsworth
The intellectual power, through words and things,
Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way!

William Wordsworth
Minds that have nothing to confer
Find little to perceive.

William Wordsworth
Spirits overwrought
Were making night do penance for a day
Spent in a round of strenuous idleness.

William Wordsworth
What is a Poet?... He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.

William Wordsworth
Thou unassuming Common-place
Of Nature, with that homely face,
And yet with something of a grace,
Which Love makes for thee!

William Wordsworth
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain.

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
My eyes are dim with childish tears,
My heart is idly stirred,
For the same sound is in my ears
Which in those days I heard.

Thus fares it still in our decay:
And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.

William Wordsworth
A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
An intellectual All-in-all!

William Wordsworth
I travelled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.

William Wordsworth
Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.

William Wordsworth
Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach
Of ordinary men.

William Wordsworth
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

William Wordsworth
A simple child, dear brother Jim,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

William Wordsworth
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

William Wordsworth
Where lies the Land to which yon Ship must go?
Fresh as a lark mounting at break of day,
Festively she puts forth in trim array.

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
Thought and theory must precede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

William Wordsworth
The best of what we do and are,
Just God, forgive!

William Wordsworth
Every gift of noble origin
Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath.

William Wordsworth
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,—
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

William Wordsworth
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

William Wordsworth
A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

William Wordsworth
The youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

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
Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,
Or reap an acre of his neighbor's corn.

William Wordsworth
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

William Wordsworth
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

William Wordsworth
We poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.

William Wordsworth