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Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth

Top 10 Best Quotes

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

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

“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.”

“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...”

“... and we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.”

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

“poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge”

“In sleep I heard the northern gleams; The stars they were among my dreams; In sleep did I behold the skies”

“I'll teach my boy the sweetest things; I'll teach him how the owlet sings.”

“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.”

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Book Keywords:

nature, wordsworth, love, tintern-abbey, finale-of-middlemarch, feelings, poetry, beauty

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