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Home  »  Dictionary of Quotations  »  William Blake

James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.

William Blake

A last judgment is necessary, because fools flourish.

A last judgment is not for making bad men better, but for hindering them from oppressing the good.

A machine is not a man or a work of art; it is destructive of humanity and art.

Accident ever varies; substance can never suffer change or decay.

Doth the eagle know what is in the pit, / Or wilt thou go ask the mole?

Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.

Error is created; truth is eternal.

Great things are done when men and mountains meet; / These are not done by jostling in the street.

He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.

He who mocks the infant’s faith / Shall be mock’d in age and death.

He’s a blockhead who wants a proof of what he can’t perceive, / And he’s a fool who tries to make such a blockhead believe.

His opinion who does not see spiritual agency in history is not worth any man’s reading.

Imagination is Eternity.

In a commercial nation impostors are abroad in all professions.

Mathematic form is eternal in the reasoning memory; living form is eternal existence.

Names alter, things never alter.

Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me.

Nature’s shadows are ever varying.

Never seek to tell thy love, / Love that never told can be, / For the gentle wind doth move / Silently, invisibly.

Nor is it possible to thought / A greater than itself to know.

Opinions concerning acts are not history; acts themselves alone are history.

People must begin before they attempt to finish or improve.

The errors of a wise man make your rule / Rather than the perfections of a fool.

The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God.

The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion but realities of intellect, from which all passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory.

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.

Unity and morality belong to philosophy, not to poetry.

When a base man means to be your enemy, he always begins with being your friend.

When a work has a unity, it is as much so in a part as in the whole.