Best Quotes from The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell by William Blake with Page Numbers

Energy is Eternal Delight.

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

The restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling.

The history of this is written in Paradise Lost.

The original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host is called the Devil, or Satan.

For this history has been adopted by both parties.

It indeed appeared to Reason as if desire was cast out.

But in Milton, the Father is Destiny, the Son a ratio of the five senses, and the Holy Ghost vacuum!

Know that after Christ’s death he became Jehovah.

Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

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

The most sublime act is to set another before you.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

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

The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.

To create a little flower is the labour of ages.

Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not to be believed.

I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception: but my senses discovered the infinite in everything.

The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.

All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains.

The Poetic Genius was the first principle, and all the others merely derivative.

It was this that our great poet King David desired so fervently.

We so loved our God that we cursed in His name all the deities of surrounding nations.

What greater subjection can be?

The desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite.

Is he honest who resists his genius or conscience, only for the sake of present ease or gratification?

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

In the first chamber was a dragon-man, clearing away the rubbish from a cave’s mouth.

The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains are in truth the causes of its life and the sources of all activity.

The weak in courage is strong in cunning.

To the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains; but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence, and fancies that the whole.

But the Prolific would cease to be prolific unless the Devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights.

These two classes of men are always upon earth, and they should be enemies.

Whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.

Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.

Jesus Christ did not wish to unite but to separate them, as in the parable of sheep and goats.

I came not to send peace, but a sword.

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

We impose on one another, and it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics.

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.

A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceived himself as much wiser than seven men.

Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; though it is only the contents or index of already published books.

Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth. Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods.

He conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable through his conceited notions.

Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s.

Let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.

Thus Swedenborg’s writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.

The worship of God is, honouring His gifts in other men each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best.

Those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.

Bray a fool in a mortar with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him.

If Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love Him in the greatest degree.

No virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments.

Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.

I beheld the Angel, who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire, and he was consumed, and arose as Elijah.

This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend; we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense.

I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no.

One law for the lion and ox is Oppression.

A SONG OF LIBERTY

The Eternal Female groan’d; it was heard over all the earth.

France, rend down thy dungeon!

Cast thy keys, O Rome, into the deep—down falling, even to eternity down falling; And weep!

On those infinite mountains of light now barr’d out by the Atlantic sea, the new-born fire stood before the starry king.

Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance!

O Jew, leave counting gold; return to thy oil and wine!

Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust.

Empire is no more! and now the lion and wolf shall cease.

For everything that lives is holy.