Skip to content

Yet sometimes, when the secret cup
Of still and serious thought went round,
It seemed as if he drank it up,
He felt with spirit so profound.

— William Wordsworth Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

Another quote →

Topics

Mind

More quotes by William Wordsworth

Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great, is passed away.

The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream.

Minds that have nothing to confer
Find little to perceive.

Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on,
Through words and things, a dim and perilous way.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

All men feel something of an honorable bigotry for the objects which have long continued to please them.

Lyrical Ballads (1798)

All William Wordsworth quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Wordsworth (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.