Quotes from William Wordsworth

Plain living and high thinking.

O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in every thing. What more I have to say is short, And you must kindly take it: It is no tale; but, should you think, Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration;—feelings too Of unremembered pleasures; such, perhaps, As have made no trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.

to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature

Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;

COMPARE) - Our birth is but a dream and a forgetting (Wordsworth) - ...so schläft er sehr rasch wieder ein, und schon nach vierundzwanzig Stunden ist es, als sei man niet weg gewesen und als sei die Reise der Traum einer Nacht. (Thomas Mann) - Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx; A mortal mother would on Lethe fix. (Byron)

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 loneliness of heart.

whom I have loved With such communion, that no place on earth Can ever be a solitude to me

The heavy weight of many a weary day Not mine, and such as were not made for me.

Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide; The Form remains, the Function never dies; While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, We Men, who in our morn of youth defied The elements, must vanish;—be it so!

Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade   Of that which once was great is pass'd away.

Choice word, and measured phrase; above the reach   Of ordinary men; a stately speech!

Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy

A natureza nunca traiu o coração que amava.

Pleasures newly found are sweet When they lie about our feet:

The happy Warrior... is he... who, with a natural instinct to discern what knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn; abides by this resolve, and stops not there, but makes his moral being his prime care.

These words were utter'd in a pensive mood,   Even while mine eyes were on that solemn sight:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild

In truth the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is

There are in our existence spots of time Which with distinct preeminence retain A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed By trivial occupations and the round Of ordinary intercourse, our minds - Especially the imaginative power - Are nourished and invisibly repaired. - The Two-Part Prelude: First Part

As tempted more; more able to endure, As more exposed to suffering and distress; Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.

Cheap matter offered they to boyish wit

Thence did I drink the visionary power; And deem not profitless those fleeting moods Of shadowy exultation: not for this, That they are kindred to our purer mind And intellectual life; but that the soul, Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not, retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity, whereto With faculties still growing, feeling still That whatsoever point they gain, they yet Have something to pursue.