William Wordsworth
109 quotes
Biography
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
"Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them."
"The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love."
"Not without hope we suffer and we mourn."
"Though nothing can bring back the hourOf splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;We will grieve not, rather findStrength in what remains behind;In the primal sympathyWhich having been must ever be..."
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."
"Nature never did betrayThe heart that loved her."
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar:Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we come"
"Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow."
"With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things."
"My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;"
"When from our better selves we have too longBeen parted by the hurrying world, and droop,Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,How gracious, how benign, is Solitude"
"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."
"Habit rules the unreflecting herd."
"The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest— Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast."
"Dear Child of Nature, let them rail!"
"Like—but oh, how different!"
"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."
"Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind."
"The flower of sweetest smell is shy and lowly."
"Ocean is a mighty harmonist."
"These feeble and fastidious times."
"Thought and theory must precede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory."
"The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this."
"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."
"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."