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William Blake (Biography)

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Author's popularity: 9
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Popularity: 3 Vote:	A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
Popularity: 11 Vote:	Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.
Popularity: 5 Vote:	As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.
Popularity: 5 Vote:	Better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire.
Popularity: 4 Vote:	Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read black where I read white.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?
Popularity: 10 Vote:	Embraces are cominglings from the head even to the feet, and not a pompous high priest entering by a secret place.
Popularity: -5 Vote:	Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	Every harlot was a virgin once.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.
Popularity: 11 Vote:	Exuberance is beauty.
Popularity: 5 Vote:	For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise.
Popularity: 5 Vote:	He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	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.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	I have no name: I am but two days old. What shall I call thee? I happy am, Joy is my name. Sweet joy befall thee!
Popularity: 2 Vote:	I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
Popularity: 11 Vote:	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.
Popularity: 4 Vote:	If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they'd immediately go out.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
Popularity: -6 Vote:	It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God only.
Popularity: 6 Vote:	Lives in eternity's sun rise.
Popularity: 5 Vote:	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.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	One thought fills immensity.
Popularity: 7 Vote:	Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.
Popularity: 7 Vote:	Prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid courted by incapacity.
Popularity: 5 Vote:	That the Jews assumed a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them and the same will it be against Christians.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
Popularity: 6 Vote:	The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	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.
Popularity: 5 Vote:	The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	The Goddess Fortune is the devil's servant, ready to kiss any one's ass.
Popularity: 6 Vote:	The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	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.
Popularity: 5 Vote:	The man who never in his mind and thoughts travel'd to heaven is no artist.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Popularity: 4 Vote:	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.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
Popularity: 8 Vote:	Thinking as I do that the Creator of this world is a very cruel being, and being a worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: "the Son, O how unlike the Father!" First God Almighty comes with a thump on the head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	Those who restrain their desires, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache; do be my enemy-for friendship's sake.
Popularity: 4 Vote:	To generalize is to be an idiot.
Popularity: 8 Vote:	To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.
Popularity: 4 Vote:	Travelers repose and dream among my leaves.
Popularity: 8 Vote:	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.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	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!
Popularity: 6 Vote:	What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.
Popularity: 4 Vote:	What is now proved was once only imagined.
Popularity: 4 Vote:	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.
Popularity: 9 Vote:	When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	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.
Popularity: 6 Vote:	When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift up thy head!
Popularity: 8 Vote:	Where mercy, love, and pity dwell, there God is dwelling too.
Popularity: 4 Vote:	You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Biography

William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker, or "Author & Printer," as he signed many of his books.

Early career

Blake was born at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London into a middle-class family. He was from earliest youth a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams, seeing "Ezekiel sitting under a green bough," and "a tree full of angels at Peckham," and such he remained to the end of his days. His teeming imagination sought expression both in verse and in drawing. At ten years old, he began engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities, a practice that was then preferred to real-life drawing. Four years later he became apprenticed to an engraver, James Basire. After two years Basire sent him to copy art from the Gothic churches in London. At the age of twenty-one Blake finished his apprenticeship and set up as a professional engraver.

In 1779, he became a student at the Royal Academy, where he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens. He preferred the Classical exactness of Michelangelo and Raphael.

In 1782 Blake met John Flaxman, who was to become his patron. In the same year he married a poor, illiterate girl named Catherine Boucher, who was five years his junior. Catherine could neither read nor write and signed her wedding contract with an X. Blake taught her reading and writing and even trained her as an engraveress. At that time, George Cumberland, one of the founders of the National Gallery, became an admirer of Blake's work.

Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was published circa 1783. After his fathers death, William and brother, Robert, opened a print shop in 1784 and began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson. At Johnson's house he met some of the leading intellectual dissidents of the time in England, including Joseph Priestley, scientist; Richard Price, philosopher; John Henry Fuseli, painter whom he became friends with; Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist; and Tom Paine, American revolutionary. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, Blake had great hopes for the American and French revolution and wore a red liberty cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries, but despaired with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in the French revolution.

Mary Wollstonecraft became a close friend, and Blake illustrated her Original Stories from Real Life(1788). They shared similar views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage. In the Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793 Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.

In 1788, at the age of thirty-one, Blake began to experiment with "relief etching", which was the method used to produce most of his books of poems. Blake wrote in a letter that the method was revealed to him in a dream of his dead brother, Robert. The process is also referred to as "illuminated printing," and final products as "illuminated books" or "prints". Illuminated printing involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid in order to dissolve away the untreated copper and leave the design standing. The pages printed from these plates then had to be hand-colored in water colors and stiched together to make up a volume. Blake used illuminated printing for four of his works: the Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and '. Each of his illuminated books was thus a unique work of art and a radical break with not only traditional book printing but the traditional means of presenting poetic and philosophical discourse. Blake seems to have believed, or rather hoped, that self-published books could liberate the artist and author from the tyranny of censorship by Church and State but its time-consuming nature meant that his most personal and prophetic works reached a minute audience in his lifetime.

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