William Blake Quotes
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Dip him in the river who loves water.
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Degrade first the Arts if you'd Mankind Degrade. Hire Idiots to Paint with cold light & hot shade: Give high Price for the worst, leave the best in disgrace, And with Labours of Ignorance fill every place.
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You become what you behold.
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In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
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Demonstration, similitude & harmony are objects of reasoning. Invention, identity & melody are objects of intuition.
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The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.
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When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
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The naked women's body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man.
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Down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as the nether sky appeared beneath us, and we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: if you please we will commit ourselves to this void and see whether providence is here also.
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If you trap the moment before it's ripe, The tears of repentence you'll certainly wipe; But if once you let the ripe moment go You can never wipe off the tears of woe.
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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.
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The hand of Vengeance found the Bed To which the Purple Tyrant fled The iron hand crush'd the tyrant's head And became Tyrant in his stead.
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The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.
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You smile with pomp and rigor, you talk of benevolence and virtue; I act with benevolence and virtue and get murdered time after time.
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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.
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The eye sees more than the heart knows.
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I care not whether a man is good or evil; all that I care / Is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go! put off holiness, / And put on intellect.
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If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they'd immediately go out.
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What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.
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Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs and flaming hair, But desire gratified Plants fruits of life and beauty there.
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The Whole Business of Man is The Arts, & All Things Common.
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A tyrant is the worst disease, and the cause of all others.
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Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory.
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The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.