Wordsworth Quotes

CHARACTER of the HAPPY WARRIOR. Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he Whom every Man in arms should wish to be? - It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought Upon the plan that pleased his childish thought: Whose high endeavours are an inward light That make the path before him always bright: Who, with a natural instinct to discern What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn; Abides by this resolve, and stops not there, 10 But makes his moral being his prime care; Who, doom'd to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train! ~ William Wordsworth

Love betters what is best ~ William Wordsworth

Far from the world I walk, and from all care. ~ William Wordsworth

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

He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with. ~ Alain De Botton

Wild is the music of autumnal winds Amongst the faded woods. ~ William Wordsworth

Books are the best type of the influence of the past. ~ William Wordsworth

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster child, her inmate man,
Forget the glories he hath known
And that imperial palace whence he came. ~ William Wordsworth

Cheap matter offered they to boyish wit, ~ William Wordsworth

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. ~ William Wordsworth

What is pride? A rocket that emulates the stars. ~ William Wordsworth

I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place. ~ Peter Finch

A happy youth, and their old age Is beautiful and free. ~ William Wordsworth

Spires whose "silent finger points to heaven." ~ William Wordsworth

I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A correspondent breeze, that gently moved With quickening virtue, but is now become A tempest, a redundant energy, Vexing its own creation. ~ William Wordsworth

Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source, The rapt one, of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth. ~ William Wordsworth

In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man.....poetry and fiction are based upon woman's love, and the movements of history are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she has inspired......there is no aspiration which any man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he desires to gratify, which is not directly related to either or both a mother or a wife. From the hearth-stone around which linger the recollections of our mother, from the fireside where our wife awaits us, come all the purity, all the hope, and all the courage with which we fight the battle of life. The man who is not thus inspired, who labors not so much to secure the applause of the world as the solid and more precious approval of his home, accomplishes little of good for others or of honor for himself. I close with the hope that each of us may always have near us:

'A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command,
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light. ~ Chauncey Mitchell DePew

Writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children are what ultimately give us our life force as adults. Without this first madness, without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods
to our most passionate selves
our lives can being to feel futile ~ Adam Phillips

The Reverie of Poor Susan
AT the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has pass'd by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale
Down which she so often has tripp'd with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all pass'd away from her eyes! ~ 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

And he is oft the wisest manWho is not wise at all. ~ William Wordsworth

Pansies, lilies, kingcups, daisies, Let them live upon their praises. ~ William Wordsworth

If all the good people were clever And all the clever people were good The world would be nicer than ever We thought that it possibly could. But somehow, 'tis seldom or ner The two hit it off as they should The good are so harsh to the clever The clever so rude to the good! ~ Elizabeth Wordsworth

The truth is easier when you leavin' it out.
Like when you "5 minutes away" but you're just leavin your house? ~ William Wordsworth

[ ... ]the stately and slow-moving Turk,
With freight of slippers piled beneath his arm. ~ William Wordsworth

Truths that wake
To perish never ~ William Wordsworth

The monumental pomp of age Was with this goodly personage; A stature undepressed in size, Unbent, which rather seemed to rise In open victory o'er the weight Of seventy years, to loftier height. ~ William Wordsworth

There is One great society alone on earth: The noble living and the noble dead. ~ William Wordsworth

THERE WAS A BOY"

THERE was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander!--many a time,
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, 10
That they might answer him.--And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call,--with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice 20
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
This boy was taken from his mates, and died
In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.
Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale
Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs
Upon a slope above the village-school; 30
An ~ William Wordsworth

Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree. ~ Robert Moor

Up up and quit your books' is not an adjuration commonly thought advisable in universities but there are occasions -- as for instance, when studying Wordsworth when it might be advisable. ~ Joseph Wood Krutch

For nature then to me was all in all. ~ William Wordsworth

Here must thou be, O man,
Strength to thyself - no helper hast thou here
Here keepest thou thy individual state:
No other can divide with thee this work,
No secondary hand can intervene
To fashion this ability. 'Tis thine,
The prime and vital principle is thine
In the recesses of thy nature, far
From any reach of outward fellowship,
Else 'tis not thine at all. ~ William Wordsworth

There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all things, but all things are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue. He can steep himself, if he wishes, in the discussion of all the social problems of his day, poor-laws and local taxation, free trade and bimetallic currency, and the like; but when he writes on these subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it, with his left hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a lyric. This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron: Wordsworth had it not. In the work of both these men there is much that we have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of calm and perfect repose which should be the effect of all fine, imaginative work. But in Keats it seemed to have been incarnate, and in his lovely ODE ON A GRECIAN URN it found its most secure and faultless expression; in the pageant of the EARTHLY PARADISE and the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones it is the one dominant note. It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a clarion note as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. Calliope's call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended; the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry. For art i ~ Oscar Wilde

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue. ~ William Wordsworth

That mighty orb of song, The divine Milton. ~ William Wordsworth

All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;
The grass is bright with rain-drops; - on the moors
The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run. ~ William Wordsworth

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

I've been a dweller on the plains, have sighed when summer days were gone; No more I'll sigh; for winter here Hath gladsome gardens of his own. ~ Dorothy Wordsworth

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them. ~ William Wordsworth

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

Fear is a cloak which old men huddle about their love, as if to keep it warm. ~ William Wordsworth

The Primrose for a veil had spread The largest of her upright leaves; And thus for purposes benign, A simple flower deceives. ~ William Wordsworth

Voltaire, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Rousseau ... established a new connection between mankind and the universe, and the result was a vast release of energy. The sun was reborn to man and so was the moon. To man, the very sun goes stale, becomes a habit. Comes a saviour, a seer, and the very sun dances new in heaven. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world Have hung upon the beatings of my heart. ~ William Wordsworth

The days are cold, the nights are long, The North wind sings a doleful song; Then hush again upon my breast; All merry things are now at rest, Save thee, my pretty love! ~ Dorothy Wordsworth

'Paradise Lost' was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully. ~ Robert Hass

Pleasures newly found are sweet When they lie about our feet. ~ William Wordsworth

And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine
A being breathing thoughtful breath
A traveler betwixt life and death
The reason firm the temperate will
Endurance Foresight Strength and skill ~ William Wordsworth

I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us onthe long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus; and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes.
Bruce Chatwin concluded from all this that we would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth. I was not sure I was living or thinking any better. ~ Rory Stewart

We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the Anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge. ~ William Wordsworth

Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness ~ William Wordsworth

Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity. ~ William Wordsworth

A deep distress hath humanised my soul. ~ William Wordsworth

Recognizes ever and anon The breeze of Nature stirring in his soul. ~ William Wordsworth

Miltons were, on the whole, the most enthusiastic poet followers. A flick through the London telephone directory would yield about four thousand John Miltons, two thousand William Blakes, a thousand or so Samuel Colleridges, five hundred Percy Shelleys, the same of Wordsworth and Keats, and a handful of Drydens. Such mass name-changing could have problems in law enforcement. Following an incident in a pub where the assailant, victim, witness, landlord, arresting officer and judge had all been called Alfred Tennyson, a law had been passed compelling each namesake to carry a registration number tattooed behind the ear. It hadn't been well received
few really practical law-enforcement measures ever are. ~ Jasper Fforde

A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts. - WORDSWORTH. ~ George Eliot

Elysian beauty, melancholy grace, Brought from a pensive though a happy place. ~ William Wordsworth

Before me begging did she stand, Pouring out sorrows like a sea; Grief after grief: - on English Land Such woes I knew could never be; And yet a boon I gave her; for the Creature Was beautiful to see; a Weed of glorious feature! ~ William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils
Beside the lake beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. ~ William Wordsworth

And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food. ~ William Wordsworth

The child is the father of man. ~ William Wordsworth

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep/ Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind. ~ William Wordsworth

In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry. ~ Bertrand Russell

It is usually in better taste to praise an isolated action or a production of genius, than a man's character as a whole. ~ Elizabeth Wordsworth

Sweet Mercy! to the gates of heaven This minstrel lead, his sins forgiven; The rueful conflict, the heart riven With vain endeavour, And memory of Earth's bitter leaven Effaced forever. ~ William Wordsworth

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

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. ~ William Wordsworth

"What is good for a bootless bene?" With these dark words begins my tale; And their meaning is, Whence can comfort spring When prayer is of no avail? ~ William Wordsworth

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

Stop thinking for once in your life! ~ William Wordsworth

Poetry is most just to its divine origin, when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion. ~ William Wordsworth

The Eagle, he was lord above ~ William Wordsworth

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

Hence, in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea ~ William Wordsworth

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. ~ William Wordsworth

This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. ~ William Wordsworth

I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons. ~ Billy Collins

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

And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man. ~ William Wordsworth

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

You learn drama from the Brontës; sense from Austen; social justice from Dickens; beauty from Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron; patience and perseverance from Gaskell; and don't even get me started on exercising your imagination with Carroll, Doyle, Wells, Wilde, Stoker-- ~ Katherine Reay

Portentous change when History can appear
As the cool Advocate of foul device;
Reckless audacity extol, and jeer
At consciences perplexed with scruples nice!
They who bewail not, must abhor, the sneer
Born of Conceit, Power's blind Idolater;
Or haply sprung from vaunting Cowardice
Betrayed by mockery of holy fear.
Hath it not long been said the wrath of Man
Works not the righteousness of God? Oh bend, 10
Bend, ye Perverse! to judgments from on High,
Laws that lay under Heaven's perpetual ban
All principles of action that transcend
The sacred limits of humanity. ~ William Wordsworth

To begin, begin. ~ William Wordsworth

Books! tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it. ~ William Wordsworth

Bright gem instinct with music, vocal spark. ~ William Wordsworth

Whom neither shape of danger can dismay, Nor thought of tender happiness betray. ~ William Wordsworth

Chains tie us down by land and sea; And wishes, vain as mine, may be All that is left to comfort thee. ~ William Wordsworth

I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man. Through ~ William Wordsworth

Worse than idle is compassion if it ends in tears and sighs. ~ William Wordsworth

Earth has not anything to show more fair. ~ William Wordsworth

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

Upon the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks, the shafts of the trees show in the light like the columns of a ruin. ~ Dorothy Wordsworth

The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower, she thought. ~ Harper Lee

The simple Wordsworth ... / Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose. ~ Lord Byron

There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift. ~ Agnes Repplier

Sweet childish days, that were as long, As twenty days are now. ~ William Wordsworth

And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind. ~ William Wordsworth

Then my heart with pleasure fills And dances with the daffodils. ~ William Wordsworth

I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; 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