Tao Te Ching
William Blake
1757 – 1827 CE
A poet, painter, and songwriter mainly unrecognized during his life and at the time considered mad, Blake is now called “far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced” and “a seminal figure in the history of poetry.” Not fully appreciated until more than 200 years after he died, he’s now considered one of the most powerful impacts on twentieth century culture with an enormous influence on Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, poets like William Butler Yeats and Allen Ginsberg, songwriters like Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. The origin of graphic novels and fantasy art trace back to Blake.
Eras
Chinese
Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE)Unlisted Sources
Annotations to Watson's "Apology for the Bible" 1798
Auguries of Innocence (1803)
Auguries of Innocence, 1787
letter to Haley, 1800
Notebook, 1793
Proverbs of Hell
Songs of Experience, 1794
The Everlasting Gospel, 1818
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793
Quotes by William Blake (46 quotes)
Chapters:
1. The Unnamed
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“A dog starv’d at his master’s gate predicts the ruin of the State.”
Chapters:
74. The Great Executioner
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“A robin redbreast in a cage puts all Heaven in a rage.”
Chapters:
20. Unconventional Mind
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“Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.”
Chapters:
58. Goals Without Means
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“Each man must create his own system or else he is a slave to another mans.”
Chapters:
71. Sick of Sickness
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“Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.”
Chapters:
77. Stringing a Bow
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“Expect poison from the standing water.”
Chapters:
24. Unnecessary Baggage
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“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses joy as it flies by
Will live in eternity's sunrise.”
Chapters:
34. An Unmoored Boat
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“How can a bird that is born for joy sit in a cage and sing?”
Chapters:
72. Helpful Fear
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“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is—infinite.”
Chapters:
81. Journey Without Goal
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“It is right it should be so:
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.”
Chapters:
23. Nothing and Not
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“Just trust yourself and you'll learn the art of living.”
Chapters:
33. Know Yourself
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“Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the World we safely go.”
Chapters:
3. Weak Wishes, Strong Bones
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“Mercy is the golden chain by which society is bound together.”
Chapters:
67. Three Treasures
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“my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing.”
Chapters:
25. The Mother of All Things
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“Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity.”
Chapters:
26. The Still Rule the Restless
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“The most sublime act is to set another before you.”
Chapters:
79. No Demands
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“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.”
Chapters:
32. Uncontrived Awareness
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“Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.”
Chapters:
70. Inscrutable
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“Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night”
Chapters:
80. A Golden Age
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“What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp dare its deadly terrors clasp!”
Chapters:
73. Heaven’s Net
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“When nations grow old the Arts grow cold; And commerce settles on every tree.”
Chapters:
78. Water
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“When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears”
Chapters:
8. Like Water
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“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.”
Chapters:
45. Complete Perfection
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“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”
Chapters:
46. Enough
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“If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.”
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“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
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“The Vegetative Universe opens like a flower from the earth's center in which is eternity.”
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“the fool who persists in his folly will become wise”
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“I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow
”
from Songs of Experience, 1794
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“We both read the Bible day and night, but you read black where I read white.”
from The Everlasting Gospel, 1818
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“The Strongest Poison ever known
Came from Caesar's Laurel Crown”
from Auguries of Innocence, 1787
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“In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.”
from Songs of Experience, 1794
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“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mid.”
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793
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“Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth.”
from Notebook, 1793
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“The laws of the Jews were the basest and most oppressive of human codes and—being like all other codes given under the pretense of divine command—were... the Abomination that maketh desolation, i.e. State Religion which is the source of all Cruelty.”
from Annotations to Watson's "Apology for the Bible" 1798
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“The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity.”
from letter to Haley, 1800
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“Awake, awake, O sleeper in the land of shadows, wake!”
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“Chaucer's characters live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining onr of these characters; nor can a child be born who is not one of these characters of Chaucer.”
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“Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.”
from Proverbs of Hell
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“The Harlot’s cry from street to Street
Shall weave Old England’s winding Sheet”
from Auguries of Innocence (1803)
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“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.”
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“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
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Quotes about William Blake (4 quotes)
“Blake wrote, "I will not cease from mental flight." Mental flight means thinking against the current, not with it. And the current flows fast and furious. It issues a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians.”
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“There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.”
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“a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light... the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas who knew something or everything about this state of being... we wanted you to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao Tzu and Shankaracharya and Huineng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree... or how to parse a sentence”
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“If we regard the world as a family of nations—equally the gospel of India, of Jesus and of Blake, Lao Tzu and Rumi—... a constant intuition of the unity of all life, and the instinctive and ineradicable conviction that the recognition of this unity is the highest good and the uttermost freedom”
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