William Blake Quotes
William Blake Quotes
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
3471 If a thing loves, it is infinite.
2462 Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
3524 Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.
4423 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.
3047 What is now proved was once only imagined.
1658 A man can't soar too high, when he flies with his own wings.
1774 Exuberance is beauty.
2665 When i tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.
3878 If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite.
3665 The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.
2923 The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
4566 Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.
2413 He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
4808 What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.
1523 The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
4057 He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
3708 For every thing that lives is Holy.
4480 When the stars threw down their spears, and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
1231 I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
1054 Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.
1829 The lamb misused breeds public strife
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.
4599 But to go to school in a summer morn,
O! It drives all joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.
3970 How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring?
4379 I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall.
4790 He who replies to words of doubt
doth put the light of knowledge out.
1076 And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
3663 But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.
3342 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.
4960 Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
4703 excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.
3486 May God us keep
From Single vision
and Newton's sleep.
3824 If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they'd immediately go out.
1339 Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness/ Which is the swiftest of all things: all were eternal torment.
4847 The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.
4158 The naked woman’s body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man.
2684 When nations grow old the Arts grow cold
And commerce settles on every tree
4437 The following Discourse [on art, by Sir Joshua Reynolds] is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo.
2677 My mother groaned, my father wept,
into the dangerous world I leapt.
4567 How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
2235 You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.
4485 Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
3616 Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
2800 Infant Joy
I have no name
I am but two days old.-
What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name,-
Sweet joy befell thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old.
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile.
I sing the while
Sweet joy befell thee.
3284 Expect poison from the standing water.
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