William Blake (1757–1827) was an English artist, engraver, mystical philosopher, visionary, and poet. His watercolors and engravings, like his writings, were appreciated fully only after his death. His poems denote the beginning of romanticism and a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment.
Blake was born in Soho, London, where he lived most of his life. His early childhood was dominated by spiritual visions that influenced his personal and working life. Instead of going to school, he was apprenticed to an engraver; there, he learned skills he was to use throughout his career as a poet.
In 1784, Blake set up a print shop, but the business struggled within a few years. For the rest of his life, Blake eked out a living as an engraver and illustrator. Blake always wrote out poems by hand on an engraving plate, rather than using type, engraved illustrations and hand-colored them—he was concerned with the presentation of his poetry as well as the words themselves.
Blake’s first book, Poetical Sketches, was published in 1783. He produced his most famous works, Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794,) by engraving both the words and the pictures on the same plate; this was his distinctive style. The Songs of Innocence are simple poems, written as if spoken by children. They are generally hopeful and optimistic. However, the Songs of Experience are also childlike in approach, but darker and more pessimistic. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience had sold fewer than 20 copies in 30 years.
At the time of his death, Blake was an unknown figure, best remembered for his engravings of other peoples’ work, or perhaps for his one famous poem, “The Tyger.” Among those familiar with his life’s work, the consensus was that he was insane. It wasn’t until 30 years after his death that a husband-and-wife team, Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, published a two-volume biography of Blake that firmly established him as a brilliant and vital artist.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Blake
Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.
—William Blake
Topics: Happiness
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
—William Blake
Topics: Time, Eternity
The hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure.
—William Blake
Topics: Time
Great things are done when men and mountains meet; this is not done by jostling in the street.
—William Blake
Topics: Challenges
When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend.
—William Blake
Topics: Enemy, Enemies
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
—William Blake
Topics: Eating
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.
—William Blake
Opposition is true friendship.
—William Blake
Topics: Opposition, Dissent
One thought fills immensity.
—William Blake
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, One liners
Pride is a personal commitment. It is an attitude which separates excellence from mediocrity.
—William Blake
Topics: Pride
Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read black where I read white.
—William Blake
Topics: Bible
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
—William Blake
Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.
—William Blake
Topics: Punishment
The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons are the fruits of two seasons.
—William Blake
Topics: Aging
Some say that happiness is not good for mortals, and they ought to be answered that sorrow is not fit for immortals and is utterly useless to any one; a blight never does good to a tree, and if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.
—William Blake
Topics: Sadness, Sorrow
Energy is the only life, and is from the body; and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy. Energy is eternal delight.
—William Blake
Topics: Energy, Health
Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius.
—William Blake
Topics: Genius, Improvement
Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be true.
—William Blake
Topics: Bureaucracy
Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied, “All poets believe it does. And in ages of imagination, this firm persuasion removes mountains; but many are not capable of firm persuasion of anything”.
—William Blake
Topics: Believe
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!
—William Blake
Topics: Society
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
—William Blake
What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.
—William Blake
Topics: Understanding
Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself.
—William Blake
Topics: Service
The strongest poison ever known came from Caesar’s laurel crown.
—William Blake
Topics: Fame
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.
—William Blake
Topics: Criminals, Crime
My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt; helpless, naked, piping loud, like a fiend hid in a cloud.
—William Blake
Topics: Birth
I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds,
to open the immortal Eyes of Man
Inwards into the Worlds of Thought;
Into eternity, ever expanding
In the Bosom of God,
The Human Imagination
—William Blake
Topics: Great, God, War, Rest
To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but immediately to the understanding or reason?
—William Blake
Topics: Imagination
Gratitude is heaven itself.
—William Blake
For everything exists and not one sigh nor smile nor tear, one hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away.
—William Blake
Topics: Truth
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
—William Blake
Topics: Perception
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
—William Blake
Topics: Wisdom
Since all the riches of this world
May be gifts from the Devil and earthly kings,
I should suspect that I worshipp’d the Devil
If I thank’d my God for worldly things.
—William Blake
Topics: Simplicity
The Goddess Fortune is the devil’s servant, ready to kiss any one’s ass.
—William Blake
Topics: Luck
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. The fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so holy.
—William Blake
Topics: Heaven, Understanding
What is now proved was only once imagined.
—William Blake
Topics: Imagination
Prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid courted by incapacity.
—William Blake
Topics: Prudence
The inquiry in England is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen’s opinions in art and science. If he is, he is a good man. If not, he must be starved.
—William Blake
Topics: Respectability, Respect
I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.
—William Blake
Topics: Politics, Politicians
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
—William Blake
Topics: Pride
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