Excerpts from Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Excerpts from Blake related to love, beauty, or other human impulses:

From Annotations to Swedenborg, 1788

If a thing loves, it is infinite.

From Songs of Experience, 1789-94

Children of the future Age / Reading this indignant page, / Know that in a former time / Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.

From the Notebook, 1800-03

When a Man has Married a Wife he finds out whether / Her Knees & elbows are only glued together

From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-93
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
What is now proved was once only imagin'd.
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
He who has suffer'd you to impose on him, knows you.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
If others had not been foolish, we should be so.
As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
Damn braces: Bless relaxes.
Exuberance is Beauty.
Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.
The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.
Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.

For the complete version of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, including Blake's engravings, see http://www.gailgastfield.com/mhh/mhh.html.