William Blake Quotes

William Blake Quotes

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

If a thing loves, it is infinite.

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

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.

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.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

A man can't soar too high, when he flies with his own wings.

Exuberance is beauty.

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.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite.

The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.

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.

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

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

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

For every thing that lives is Holy.

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?

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

Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.

The lamb misused breeds public strife
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.

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.

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?

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.

He who replies to words of doubt
doth put the light of knowledge out.

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

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.

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.

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.

May God us keep
From Single vision
and Newton's sleep.

If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they'd immediately go out.

Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness/ Which is the swiftest of all things: all were eternal torment.

The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.

The naked woman’s body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man.

When nations grow old the Arts grow cold
And commerce settles on every tree

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.

My mother groaned, my father wept,
into the dangerous world I leapt.

How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?

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.

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.

Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.

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.

Expect poison from the standing water.

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