William Wordsworth

Literature English 1770 – 1850 111 quotes

A major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature.

Quotes by 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.

Poems, in Two Volumes ('I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud') 1807

The Child is father of the Man.

My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold 1802

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (Preface) 1800

The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.

Poems, in Two Volumes ('The world is too much with us') 1807

Come forth into the light of things, let Nature be your teacher.

Lyrical Ballads ('The Tables Turned') 1798

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!

The Prelude, Book XI 1805

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.

Poems, in Two Volumes ('Ode: Intimations of Immortality') 1807

One impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can.

Lyrical Ballads ('The Tables Turned') 1798

The best portion of a good man's life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

Lyrical Ballads ('Tintern Abbey') 1798

To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Poems, in Two Volumes ('Ode: Intimations of Immortality') 1807

Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty.

Poems, in Two Volumes ('Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802') 1807

That inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.

Poems, in Two Volumes ('I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud') 1807

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (Preface) 1800

The human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants.

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (Preface) 1800

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, and shares the nature of infinity.

The Excursion, Book VI 1814

A poet could not but be gay, in such a jocund company.

Poems, in Two Volumes ('I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud') 1807

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.

Lyrical Ballads ('Expostulation and Reply') 1798

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.

Lyrical Ballads ('Tintern Abbey') 1798

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.

Lyrical Ballads ('Tintern Abbey') 1798

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

Poems, in Two Volumes ('The world is too much with us') 1807