Top 100 William Wordsworth Quotes
#1. The harvest of a quiet eye, That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
William Wordsworth
#2. Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves Of their bad influence, and their good receives.
William Wordsworth
#3. Turning, for them who pass, the common dust Of servile opportunity to gold.
William Wordsworth
#4. Long as there's a sun that sets, Primroses will have their glory; Long as there are violets, They will have a place in story: There's a flower that shall be mine, 'Tis the little Celandine.
William Wordsworth
#5. 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
#8. One interior life in which all beings live with God, themselves are God, existing in the mighty whole, indistinguishable as the cloudless east is from the cloudless west, when all the hemisphere is one cerulean blue.
William Wordsworth
#10. We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.
William Wordsworth
#12. What know we of the Blest above but that they sing, and that they love?
William Wordsworth
#13. 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
#14. Let beeves and home-bred kine partake The sweets of Burn-mill meadow; The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow!
William Wordsworth
#15. And when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew Soul-animating strains,-alas! too few.
William Wordsworth
#18. 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.
William Wordsworth
#19. Hence, in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
William Wordsworth
#21. I had melancholy thoughts...
a strangeness in my mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place.
William Wordsworth
#22. My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man;
William Wordsworth
#23. Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: 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(Tintern Abbey)
William Wordsworth
#24. 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
#25. Imagination, which in truth
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And reason, in her most exalted mood.
William Wordsworth
#26. 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
#27. But who is innocent? By grace divine, Not otherwise,O Nature! we are thine.
William Wordsworth
#28. It is the 1st mild day of March. Each minute sweeter than before ... there is a blessing in the air.
William Wordsworth
#29. I've watched you now a full half-hour; Self-poised upon that yellow flower And, little Butterfly! Indeed I know not if you sleep or feed. How motionless! - not frozen seas More motionless! and then What joy awaits you, when the breeze Hath found you out among the trees, And calls you forth again!
William Wordsworth
#30. 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
#31. Stay, little cheerful Robin! stay, And at my casement sing, Though it should prove a farewell lay And this our parting spring. * * * * * Then, little Bird, this boon confer, Come, and my requiem sing, Nor fail to be the harbinger Of everlasting spring.
William Wordsworth
#32. But how can he expect that others should Build for him, sow for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?
William Wordsworth
#34. The moving accident is not my trade; To freeze the blood I have no ready arts: 'Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.
William Wordsworth
#35. If thou art beautiful, and youth and thought endue thee with all truth-be strong;
be worthy of the grace of God.
William Wordsworth
#36. - Beclouded The sky is low, the clouds are mean, A travelling flake of snow Across a barn or through a rut Debates if it will go. A narrow wind complains all day How some one treated him; Nature, like us, is sometimes caught Without her diadem.
William Wordsworth
#37. We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
William Wordsworth
#38. The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society.
William Wordsworth
#39. The streams with softest sound are flowing, The grass you almost hear it growing, You hear it now, if e'er you can.
William Wordsworth
#40. Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods, and mountains; and of all that we behold from this green earth.
William Wordsworth
#41. The heavy weight of many a weary day Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
William Wordsworth
#42. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 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
#43. The bosom-weight, your stubborn gift, That no philosophy can lift.
William Wordsworth
#44. 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
#45. 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
#48. 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
#50. A babe, by intercourse of touch I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart.
William Wordsworth
#51. Look for the stars, you'll say that there are none; / Look up a second time, and, one by one, / You mark them twinkling out with silvery light, / And wonder how they could elude the sight!
William Wordsworth
#52. Chains tie us down by land and sea; And wishes, vain as mine, may be All that is left to comfort thee.
William Wordsworth
#55. [ ... ]the stately and slow-moving Turk,
With freight of slippers piled beneath his arm.
William Wordsworth
#56. And what if thou, sweet May, hast known
Mishap by worm and blight;
If expectations newly blown
Have perished in thy sight;
If loves and joys, while up they sprung,
Were caught as in a snare;
Such is the lot of all the young,
However bright and fair.
William Wordsworth
#57. But thou art with us, with us in the past,
The present, with us in the times to come.
There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,
No languor, no dejection, no dismay,
No absence scarcely can there be, for those
Who love as we do. Speed thee well!
William Wordsworth
#58. 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
#59. The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
William Wordsworth
#60. The light that never was, on sea or land; The consecration, and the Poet's dream.
William Wordsworth
#61. Pleasure is spread through the earth In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.
William Wordsworth
#62. Faith is, necessary to explain anything, and to reconcile the foreknowledge of God with human evil.
William Wordsworth
#64. Those old credulities, to Nature dear, Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock Of history?
William Wordsworth
#68. 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
#69. The good die first, and they whose hearts are dry as summer dust, burn to the socket.
William Wordsworth
#70. Still glides the stream
and shall forever glide
its form remains its function never dies
while we the brave and the mighty and the wise
we men who in our youth defied the elements
must vanish-
be it so
William Wordsworth
#71. That to this mountain-daisy's self were known The beauty of its star-shaped shadow, thrown On the smooth surface of this naked stone!
William Wordsworth
#73. One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.
William Wordsworth
#76. While all the future, for thy purer soul,
With "sober certainties" of love is blest.
William Wordsworth
#77. Look at the fate of summer flowers, which blow at daybreak, droop ere even-song.
William Wordsworth
#78. Thou has left behind Powers that will work for thee,-air, earth, and skies! There 's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind.
William Wordsworth
#80. Spade! Thou art a tool of honor in my hands. I press thee, through a yielding soil, with pride.
William Wordsworth
#81. Great men have been among us; hands that penn'd
And tongues that utter'd wisdom
better none
William Wordsworth
#82. The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.
William Wordsworth
#83. As thou these ashes, little brook, wilt bear Into the Avon, Avon to the tide Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas, Into main ocean they, this deed accursed An emblem yields to friends and enemies How the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified By truth, shall spread, throughout the world dispersed.
William Wordsworth
#84. Miss not the occasion; by the forelock take that subtle power, the never-halting time.
William Wordsworth
#87. [Mathematics] is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.
William Wordsworth
#89. In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay
Tribute to ease; and, of its joy secure,
The heart luxuriates with indifferent things,
Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones,
And on the vacant air.
William Wordsworth
#90. Everything is tedious when one does not read with the feeling of the Author.
William Wordsworth
#91. 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
#93. When men change swords for ledgers, and desert
The student's bower for gold, some fears unnamed
I had, my Country
am I to be blamed?
William Wordsworth
#94. A simple child. That lightly draws its breath. And feels its life in every limb. What should it know of death?
William Wordsworth
#95. Neither evil tongues, rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life, shall ever prevail against us.
William Wordsworth
#97. Not in Utopia,
subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows whereBut in the very world, which is the worldOf all of us,
the place where in the endWe find our happiness, or not at all
William Wordsworth
#98. Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.
William Wordsworth
#99. Up! up! my friend, and quit your books, Or surely you 'll grow double! Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks! Why all this toil and trouble?
William Wordsworth
#100. Action is transitory, a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle, this way or that,
'Tis done
And in the after-vacancy,
We wonder at ourselves, like men betrayed.
William Wordsworth
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