Blake on his work Flashcards
On Contraries
Without contraries is no progression. Attraction
and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate,
are necessary to human existence.
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell (1793)
Blake on being enslaved by a system
“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
Blake on this imagination
“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”
Blake on christianity
“The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.”
Blake on art and science
Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.
Blake on achieving happiness
I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision.
…To the eyes of a miser… a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes.
Rousseau on imagination
“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”
Rousseau on civilization
“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
Rousseau on freedom
“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”
Marx on religion
“Religion is the opium of the people.”
Marx on the ruling ideas
“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class”
Marx to workers
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
Marks on the consciousness of men
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
Thomas Paine - chartered
‘Every chartered town is an aristocratical monopoly in itself
Thomas Paine - about London
“It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic.”
