William Blake Quotes

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

We are here to learn to endure the beams of love.

All futurity seems teeming with endless destruction never to be repelled; Desperate remorse swallows the present in a quenchless rage.

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

Make your own rules or be a slave to another man's.

Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read'st black where I read white.

Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll’d Around their shores, indignant burning with the fires of Orc.

London

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devils' party without knowing it.

Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart;
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears—
Ah, she doth depart. Soon as she was gone from me
A traveler came by
Silently, invisibly—
Oh, was no deny.

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love All pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness. For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is God, our father dear, And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is Man, his child and care. For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.

He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out.

Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.

Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.