William Wordsworth Quotes

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.

A lot of my songs are just posing questions, because I'm on a journey to find the answers myself.

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.

I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.

It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.

The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.

I think the terminology I would use is 'a continuous process of reflection'. I've always thought of only two questions that have mattered to me personally. One is what is really needed in the world and the second is what's really important to me and how these two intersect. It's always been a reflective process - spiraling around these two poles.

I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

I never go anywhere or do anything that transports me outside the boundaries of my mind.

Direct your eye inward, and you'll find / A thousand regions in your mind / Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be / Expert in home-cosmography

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

Let an idea swim to the surface like a fish in a pool...let the mind drift to the vision.

Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind's roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feed pulled to.

I am not going to show you my art. I am going to share it with you. If I show it to you it becomes an exhibition, and in time it will be pushed so far into the back of your mind that it will be lost. But by sharing it with you, you will not only retain it forever, but I too will improve.

O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in everything.

It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.

I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

First one works alone through the mind, then before the public through experience.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.