Top 400 William Wordsworth Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Prompt to move but firm to wait – knowing things rashly sought are rarely found.”

— William Wordsworth

302. “O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in everything.”

— William Wordsworth

303. “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; And hermits are contented with their cells.”

— William Wordsworth

304. “Great is the glory, for the strife is hard!”

— William Wordsworth

305. “In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay Tribute to ease; and, of its joy secure, The heart luxuriates with indifferent things, Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones, And on the vacant air.”

— William Wordsworth

306. “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

307. “For by superior energies; more strict affiance in each other; faith more firm in their unhallowed principles, the bad have fairly earned a victory over the weak, the vacillating, inconsistent good.”

— William Wordsworth

308. “Meek Nature’s evening comment on the shows That for oblivion take their daily birth From all the fuming vanities of earth.”

— William Wordsworth

309. “Faith is, necessary to explain anything, and to reconcile the foreknowledge of God with human evil.”

— William Wordsworth

310. “The feather, whence the pen Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men, Dropped from an angel’s wing.”

— William Wordsworth

311. “One of those heavenly days that cannot die.”

— William Wordsworth

312. “And through the heat of conflict keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw.”

— William Wordsworth

313. “Rapt into still communion that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, His mind was a thanksgiving to the power That made him; it was blessedness and love!”

— William Wordsworth

314. “The streams with softest sound are flowing, The grass you almost hear it growing, You hear it now, if e’er you can.”

— William Wordsworth

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

— William Wordsworth

316. “For mightier far Than strength of nerve or sinew, or the sway Of magic potent over sun and star, Is love, though oft to agony distrest, And though his favourite be feeble woman’s breast.”

— William Wordsworth

317. “Knowledge and increase of enduring joy From the great Nature that exists in works Of mighty Poets.”

— William Wordsworth

318. “Fear is a cloak which old men huddle about their love, as if to keep it warm.”

— William Wordsworth

319. “But how can he expect that others should Build for him, sow for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?”

— William Wordsworth

320. “Truths that wake To perish never.”

— William Wordsworth

321. “Yet tears to human suffering are due; And mortal hopes defeated and o’erthrown Are mourned by man, and not by man alone.”

— William Wordsworth

322. “All men feel a habitual gratitude, and something of an honorable bigotry, for the objects which have long continued to please them.”

— William Wordsworth

323. “Pleasures newly found are sweet When they lie about our feet.”

— William Wordsworth

324. “O dearer far than light and life are dear.”

— William Wordsworth

325. “A tale in everything.”

— William Wordsworth

326. “The best of what we do and are, Just God, forgive!”

— William Wordsworth

327. “A lawyer art thou? Draw not nigh! Go, carry to some fitter place The keenness of that practised eye, The hardness of that sallow face.”

— William Wordsworth

328. “The wind, a sightless laborer, whistles at his task.”

— William Wordsworth

329. “The Primrose for a veil had spread The largest of her upright leaves; And thus for purposes benign, A simple flower deceives.”

— William Wordsworth

330. “Bright gem instinct with music, vocal spark.”

— William Wordsworth

331. “Babylon, Learned and wise, hath perished utterly, Nor leaves her speech one word to aid the sigh That would lament her.”

— William Wordsworth

332. “For youthful faults ripe virtues shall atone.”

— William Wordsworth

333. “But to a higher mark than song can reach, Rose this pure eloquence.”

— William Wordsworth

334. “One solace yet remains for us who came Into this world in days when story lacked Severe research, that in our hearts we know How, for exciting youth’s heroic flame, Assent is power, belief the soul of fact.”

— William Wordsworth

335. “With battlements that on their restless fronts Bore stars.”

— William Wordsworth

336. “A youth to whom was given So much of earth, so much of heaven.”

— William Wordsworth

337. “She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.”

— William Wordsworth

338. “The mysteries that cups of flowers infold And all the gorgeous sights which fairies do behold.”

— William Wordsworth

339. “The intellectual power, through words and things, Went sounding on a dim and perilous way!”

— William Wordsworth

340. “The mightiest lever known to the world: imagination.”

— William Wordsworth

341. “The good die first.”

— William Wordsworth

342. “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

343. “Oh for a single hour of that Dundee Who on that day the word of onset gave!”

— William Wordsworth

344. “But who would force the soul tilts with a straw Against a champion cased in adamant.”

— William Wordsworth

345. “Poetry has never brought me in enough money to buy shoestrings.”

— William Wordsworth

346. “Worse than idle is compassion if it ends in tears and sighs.”

— William Wordsworth

347. “Shalt show us how divine a thing A woman may be made.”

— William Wordsworth

348. “A few strong instincts and a few plain rules.”

— William Wordsworth

349. “Myriads of daisies have shone forth in flower Near the lark’s nest, and in their natural hour Have passed away; less happy than the one That by the unwilling ploughshare died to prove The tender charm of poetry and love.”

— William Wordsworth

350. “The Eagle, he was lord above.”

— William Wordsworth