Life & Wisdom Quote by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s line is a quiet rebuke disguised as a self-help maxim: stop treating conviction as a virtue and start treating curiosity as a discipline. Coming from a poet routinely miscast as a soft-focus nature mystic, it lands with surprising bite. The target isn’t religion alone, or politics alone, but the whole human habit of preferring a comforting story to an inconvenient encounter with reality.

The phrase “will to believe” implies effortful self-persuasion, a kind of moral flexing: you grit your teeth and make yourself certain. Wordsworth flips the prestige. “Wish to find out” sounds gentler, almost childlike, but it’s the more demanding posture because it requires vulnerability. If you genuinely want to find out, you have to risk being wrong, and you have to accept that the world won’t organize itself around your preferences. The subtext is anti-ideological: belief as performance versus discovery as exposure.

In Wordsworth’s Romantic context, this is also an argument about how knowledge happens. The era was negotiating the claims of Enlightenment rationalism, organized religion, and an emerging modern self. Wordsworth often insists that perception, attention, and lived experience are not inferior to doctrine; they’re where meaning is actually made. That’s why the line still reads modern. It sides with epistemic humility over hot takes, with the investigative impulse over the identity badge. The wish to find out is not passive; it’s a commitment to reality that refuses to be bullied by certainty.