Quotes by William Wordsworth

...The happy Warrior... is the generous Spirit, who, when brought among the tasks of real life, hath wrought upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought: whose high endeavors are an inward light that makes the path before him always bright.

Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart

...The happy Warrior... is he... who, doomed to go in company with pain, and fear, and bloodshed, miserable train turns his necessity to glorious gain; in face of these doth exercise a power which is our human natures highest dower: controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves of their bad influence, and their good receives: by objects, which might force the soul to abate her feeling, rendered more compassionate; is placable— because occasions rise so often that demand such sacrifice; more skillful in self-knowledge, even more pure, as tempted more; more able to endure, as more exposed to suffering and distress; thence, also, more alive to tenderness.

Duty were our games.

Go to the poets, they will speak to theeMore perfectly of purer creatures--

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 interveneTo fashion this ability. Tis thine,The prime and vital principle is thineIn the recesses of thy nature, farFrom any reach of outward fellowship,Else tis not thine at all.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting...

What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued 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.

we not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particularway in which we have been accustomed to be pleased.

friend is the one who showes the way and walks a piece of road with us

A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.

In ourselves our safety must be sought. By our own right hand it must be wrought.

Hence, in a season of calm weatherThough inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Is then no nook of English ground secureFrom rash assault?

To character and success two things contradictory as they may seem must go together-humble dependence and manly independence: humble dependence on God and manly reliance on self.

The child is father of the man.

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

Faith is a passionate intuition.