William Wordsworth Quotes

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

I've never outgrown my childhood.

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

My father read Charles Dickens to us as children, and at the end of virtually every novel he would choke up and start to cry - and my father NEVER cried. It always made me love him all the more.

We are all children until our fathers die.

I adhere to the religion of art and music and small children.

I think all men when they get older, they look at the mirror and they probably see their father a little bit.

She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child.

Over at our place, we’re sure of just one thing: everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grown-ups, and we don’t think of children. But just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us, that maybe the world has made us forget.

At last there dawned the most beautiful day of all the days of my life. How perfectly I remember even the smallest details of those sacred hours! The joyful awakening, the reverent and tender embraces of my mistresses and older companions, the room filled with white frocks, like so many snowflakes, where each child was dressed in turn.

How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world improve a sense of its natural beauties upon us. Like poor Falstaff, although I do not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have know from my infancy - their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with superhuman fancy.

A small child has no ambitions, he has no desires. He is so absorbed in the moment - a bird on the wing catches his eye so totally; just a butterfly, its beautiful colors, and he is enchanted; the rainbow in the sky... and he cannot conceive that there can be anything more significant, richer than this rainbow. And the night full of stars, stars beyond stars... Innocence is rich, it is full, it is pure.

If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.

Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

I think a child calling for his mother is the most beautiful sound in the world.

He stood staring into the wood for a minute, then said: "What is it about the English countryside — why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?" He sounded faintly sad. Perhaps he finds beauty saddening — I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty's evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die. Then he said I was probably too young to understand him; but I understood perfectly.

I remember, as a kid, my dad always told me, "Getting older beats the alternative." Although, now my father actually is the alternative, so I don't know what he would say. He's completely dead.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.

I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.

Most of us have felt barriers between ourselves and our fathers and had thought that going it alone was part of what it meant to be a man. We tried to get close to our children when we became fathers, and yet the business of practicing masculinity kept getting in the way. We men have begun to talk about that.

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.

When I think about my father, the first image that comes to mind is holding his hand as he drove me to the train station six weeks before he died; I had never noticed how beautiful his hands were until I saw them, for the first and last time, entwined in mine.

I sometimes think it's a mistake to have been happy when one was a child. One should always want to go on, not back.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.