Life & Wisdom Quote by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth lands the punch in accountant’s language: “getting” and “spending,” two tidy verbs that sound like responsible adulthood, become a moral indictment. The line’s force is how it shrinks an entire way of life into a rhythm of transactions, then flips the expected outcome. We’re not building security; we’re “lay[ing] waste our powers.” “Powers” isn’t just money or labor. It’s perception, attention, the capacity for awe - the human equipment Romantic poets treated as sacred. The subtext is brutal: capitalism isn’t merely extracting time; it’s colonizing the inner life.

Context matters. This comes from “The World Is Too Much with Us” (1807), written as industrialization accelerates and Britain’s economy reorganizes around markets, wage work, and mass consumption. Wordsworth isn’t nostalgia-posting about shepherds. He’s diagnosing a spiritual attention deficit engineered by the new tempo of modern life. The phrase “lay waste” carries environmental violence too; it echoes enclosure, extraction, and the literal reshaping of landscapes that made “getting” possible. Waste happens both inside us and around us.

The line works because it doesn’t sermonize about greed; it stages a trade we can feel. In chasing acquisition and then burning it off in consumption, we squander the very faculties that could make life rich without buying anything. It’s an early, elegantly bleak sketch of the modern condition: hyperactive economy, underused soul.