William Blake

William Blake

(1757-1827) British poet and essayist

• "Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll'd

Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc" (America, A Prophecy)

• "Damn sneerers!"
  Source: "Annotations to Lavater" (1788)

• "True superstition is ignorant honesty & this is beloved of god and man." (ibid)

• "Forgiveness of enemies can only come upon their repentance." (ibid)

• "Active Evil is better than Passive Good." (ibid)

• "They suppose that Woman's Love is Sin; in consequence all the Loves & Graces with them are Sin." (ibid)

• "There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness."
  Source: "Annotations to Swedenborg" (1788)

• "If a thing loves, it is infinite." (ibid)

• "Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more."
  Source: "There Is No Natural Religion" (1788)

• "The true method of knowledge is experiment."
  Source: "All Religions are One" (1788)

• "Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence."
  Source: "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

• "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."

• "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite".
  Source: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

• "He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence." (ibid)

• "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." (ibid)

• "The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow." (ibid)

• "He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars."
  Source: Jerusalem, Chapter 3, Plate 55

• "To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour."
  Source: "Auguries of Innocence," in Poems from the Pickering Manuscript

• "Love to faults is always blind, Always is to joys inclind, Lawless wingd & unconfind, And breaks all chains from every mind."
  Source: Notebook Poems and Fragments

• "Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling."
  Source: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 5.

• "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." (ibid.)

• "Opposition is true Friendship."
  Source: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

• "Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright/ In the forests of the night,/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
  Source: "The Tyger" in Songs of Experience

• "Children of the future Age / Reading this indignant page, / Know that in a former time / Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime." from Songs of Experience

• "If you have form'd a Circle to go into, / Go into it yourself & see how you would do." (Notebook)

• "When a Man has Married a Wife he finds out whether / Her Knees & elbows are only glued together" (ibid)

Unsourced

• "No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings."

• "It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God only."

• "When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift up thy head!"

• "Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public RECORDS to be true."

• "Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds."

• "Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you."

• "Want of money and the distress of a thief can never be alleged as the cause of his thieving, for many honest people endure greater hardships with fortitude. We must therefore seek the cause elsewhere than in want of money, for that is the miser's passion, not the thief's."

• "The weak in courage is strong in cunning."

• "The foundation of empire is art & science. Remove them or degrade them, & the empire is no more."

• "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

• "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees."

• "Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth."

• "To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit. General knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess."

• "Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night."

• "Acts themselves alone are history. Tell me the acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish! All that is not action is not worth reading."

• "Every harlot was a virgin once."

• "Thinking as I do that the Creator of this world is a very cruel being, & being a worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: "the Son, O how unlike the Father!" First God Almighty comes with a thump on the head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it."

• "You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, & you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue."

• "The Goddess Fortune is the devil's servant, ready to kiss any one's arse."

• "To the eyes of a miser a guinea is more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes."

• "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity . . . and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."

• "Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed."

• "What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care."

• "The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."

• "Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion."

• "Some say that happiness is not good for mortals, & they ought to be answered that sorrow is not fit for immortals & is utterly useless to any one; a blight never does good to a tree, & if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight."

• "He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star."

• "One thought fills immensity."

• "The hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure."

• "When I tell any truth it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do."

• "As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers."

• "Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence."

• "Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death."

• "It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God only."

• "That the Jews assumed a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them and the same will it be against Christians."

• "What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion. O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!"

• "When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend."

• "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."

• "A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent."

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