Wise Words from Wordsworth

-The child is the father of the man.
-Strongest minds/Are often those of whom the noisy world/Hears least.
-A man of hope and forward-looking mind/Even to the last!
-They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude.
-That best portion of a good man’s life./His little, nameless, unremembered acts/Of kindness and love.
-We are laid asleep/In body, and become a living soul:/While with an eye made quiet by the power/Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,/We see into the life of things.
-For Nature then…/To me was all in all.
-I have learned/To look on nature not as in the hour/Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes/The still, sad music of humanity.
-I have felt/A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
-Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her.
-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;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!/…for this, for everything, we are out of tune.
-Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.
-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 had been of yore;–/Turn wheresoe’er I may,/By night or day,/The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
-But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
-Whither is the visionary gleam?/Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
-Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting.
-Shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing boy.
-Though nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.
-In the faith that looks through death,/In years that bring the philosophic mind.
-To me the meanest flower that blows can give/Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
-Whether we be young or old,/Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,/Is with infinitude, and only there;/With hope it is, hope that can never die./Effort, and expectation, and desire,/And something evermore about to be.
-There is/One great society alone on earth:/The noble living and the noble dead.
-That blessed mood,/In which the burthen of the mystery,/In which the heavy and the weary weight/Of all this unintelligible world,/Is lightened.
-Plain living and high thinking are no more.
-One impulse from a vernal wood/May teach you more of man,/Of moral evil and good,/Than all the sages can.
-‘Tis said that some have died for love.
-Pleasures newly found are sweet/When they lie about our feet.
-Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade/Of that which once was great is passed away.
-Small service is true service, while it lasts.
-Poetry is the breadth and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.
-Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.
-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.