William Wordsworth - Eye Quotes

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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
Ah, what a warning for a thoughtless man, Could field or grove, could any spot of earth, Show to his eye an image of the pangs Which it hath witnessed,-render back an echo Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod!

William Wordsworth
A lawyer art thou? Draw not nigh! Go, carry to some fitter place The keenness of that practised eye, The hardness of that sallow face.

William Wordsworth
Eyes of some men travel far For the finding of a star; Up and down the heavens they go. Like a sage astronomer.

William Wordsworth
The softest breeze to fairest flowers gives birth: Think not that Prudence dwells in dark abodes, She scans the future with the eye of gods.

William Wordsworth
Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky! Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound? Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?

William Wordsworth
The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober coloring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

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
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
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
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
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
As in the eye of Nature he has lived,
So in the eye of Nature let him die!

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
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.

William Wordsworth
Thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind.

William Wordsworth
Yon foaming flood seems motionless as ice;
Its dizzy turbulence eludes the eye,
Frozen by distance.

William Wordsworth
All the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive.

William Wordsworth
If Thou be one whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure
Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride,
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy. The man whose eye
Is ever on himself doth look on one,
The least of Nature's works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful, ever. O be wiser, thou!
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love;
True dignity abides with him alone
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,
Can still suspect, and still revere himself,
In lowliness of heart.

William Wordsworth
While 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
Physician art thou?—one, all eyes,
Philosopher!—a fingering slave,
One that would peep and botanize
Upon his mother's grave?

William Wordsworth
If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; And that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came,
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Now wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.

William Wordsworth
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath;
A traveller betwixt life and death.

William Wordsworth
The eye—it cannot choose but see;
we cannot bid the ear be still;
our bodies feel, where'er they be,
against or with our will.

William Wordsworth