William Blake Quotes
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The Angel that presided o'er my birth Said, 'Little creature, formed of joy and mirth, Go love without the help of any thing on earth'.
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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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Demonstration, similitude & harmony are objects of reasoning. Invention, identity & melody are objects of intuition.
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You become what you behold.
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The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.
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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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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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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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In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
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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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The naked women's body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man.
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The eye sees more than the heart knows.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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A dog starv'd at the master's gate Predicts the ruin of the State. A horse misus'd upon the road Calls to heaven for human blood. Each outcry of the hunted hare A fibre from the brain does tear, A skylark wounded on the wing, A cherubim does cease to sing.
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The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
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If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they'd immediately go out.
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Does the Eagle know what is in the pit Or wilt thou go ask the Mole? Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod, Or Love in a golden bowl?
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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.