Lyrical Ballads Quotes

“The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“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.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how; instruct them how the mind of man becomes a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells...”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“... and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things—
We murder to dissect.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“In sleep I heard the northern gleams;
The stars they were among my dreams;
In sleep did I behold the skies”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“I'll teach my boy the sweetest things;
I'll teach him how the owlet sings.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“I heard a thousand blended notes
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“If thou be one whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure,
Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know, that pride,
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he, who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy. 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 lowliness of heart.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And 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;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“But the sweet face of Lucy Gray
Will never more be seen.
The storm came on before its time:
She wandered up and down;
And many a hill did Lucy climb:
But never reached the town.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“Such views the youthful Bard allure,
But, heedless of the following gloom,
He deems their colours shall endure
'Till peace go with him to the tomb.
—And let him nurse his fond deceit,
And what if he must die in sorrow!
Who would not cherish dreams so sweet,
Though grief and pain may come tomorrow?”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride,
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he, who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy...”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“The pleasure-house is dust:—behind, before,
This is no common waste, no common gloom;
But Nature, in due course of time, once more
Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom.

She leaves these objects to a slow decay,
That what we are, and have been, may be known;
But at the coming of the milder day,
These monuments shall all be overgrown.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“In nature there is nothing melancholy.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798

“The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and love it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads