William Blake

When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend.

Prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid courted by incapacity.

If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they'd immediately go out.

Those who restrain their desires, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.

The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.

What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.

A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.

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!

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.

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.

To the eyes of a miser a guinea is more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes.

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

I am in you and you in me, mutual in divine love.

Where mercy, love, and pity dwell, there God is dwelling too.

Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

Opposition is true friendship.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.

Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.

Exuberance is beauty.

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.