Life & Wisdom Quote by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth lands the punch with a Puritan economy of outrage: he doesn’t accuse society of being distracted, he accuses it of worshipping the wrong god. “Rapine, avarice, expense” is a brutal tricolon, a three-beat drumroll that moves from violence (taking) to appetite (wanting) to performance (spending). The escalation matters. He’s not just condemning greed; he’s diagnosing a culture where consumption becomes a public liturgy, a way of proving you belong.

Calling it “idolatry” is a calculated provocation. In a Christian moral universe, idolatry isn’t a bad habit; it’s a wholesale betrayal. Wordsworth frames early industrial modernity as a spiritual regime change: economic forces don’t merely rearrange work and cities, they rewire devotion. “And these we adore” turns the knife by making it communal. This isn’t a villain monologue about corrupt elites. It’s an indictment of “we,” the crowd that claps along.

“Plain living and high thinking are no more” is the line that reveals the deeper fear: not poverty, but the loss of an inner scale of value. “Plain” suggests sufficiency, a life not organized around display; “high thinking” suggests a mind trained on meaning rather than novelty. The rhyme of “expense” with “no more” (a sonic drop-off) reinforces the sense of collapse.

The context is the Romantic backlash against a Britain reshaped by industry, imperial trade, and urbanization. Wordsworth’s real complaint is that material progress can arrive with a quiet cultural amnesia: the landscape changes outside, then the landscape inside follows.