Painters From England

"General principles are not the less true or important because, from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it, or like that secret influence which binds the world together and holds the planets in their orbits."

"Well, I've had a happy life."

"Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own."

"When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest."

"The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance."

"The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings."

"Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for — they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?"

"If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power, for you necessarily feel some towards him; and since he will take no denial, you must comply with his peremptory demands, or send for a constable, which out of respect for his character you will not do."

"Man is a make-believe animal — he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part."

"Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols — it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them."

"I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began."

"A scholar is like a book written in a dead language — it is not every one that can read in it."

"The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much."

"You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world."

"Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man."

"Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone — but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming."

"We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts."

"The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion."

"Those who aim at faultless regularity will only produce mediocrity, and no one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves."

"The miscreant Hazlitt continues, I have heard, his abuses of Southey, Coleridge and myself, in the Examiner. — I hope that you do not associate with this Fellow, he is not a proper person to be admitted into respectable society, being the most perverse and malevolent Creature that ill luck has ever thrown in my way. Avoid him — hic niger est — And this, I understand, is the general opinion wherever he is known in London."

"John Lamb (the brother of Charles) once knocked down Hazlitt, who was impertinent to him; and on those who were present interfering and begging Hazlitt to shake hands and forgive him, Hazlitt said, "Well, I don't care if I do. I am a metaphysician, and do not mind a blow; nothing but an idea hurts me.""

"If Samuel Johnson was the more deliberate aphorist, Hazlitt was the more self-conscious literary architect. You quote lines from Johnson; you want to recite entire passages from Hazlitt."

"His manners are to 99 in 100 singularly repulsive—; brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange. … he is, I verily believe, kindly-nature; is very of, attentive to, and patient with children; but he is jealous, gloomy, and of an irritable pride — and addicted to women, as objects of sexual indulgence."

"He who would see old Hoghton right Must view it by the pale moonlight."

"Good temper is one of the great preservers of the features."

"The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours."

"But fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath — tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute."

"A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man."

"Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life."

"Defoe says, that there were a hundred thousand stout country-fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse."

"We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it."

"Prejudice is the child of ignorance…"

"Again, there is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have also their altars and their religion."

"The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be as constantly wound up."

"Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau. Mock on, mock on — 'tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again."

"It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion."

"Most scientists would make very hard work of explaining how the concept of soul fits into the material universe, where there is nothing but "atoms and the void." Was this what Blake meant when he said that science was a tree of death? The death of religion? Of imagination? Both have been frequently suggested. ...Science is certainly our prime weapon against superstition and irrationalism, but in a world in which science flourishes—with or without God—love and fear remain, as do pleasure and regret, poetry and humor, art and music. The arts are not lessened by the sciences. Blake was mistaken: man's ineradicable gift, his questing curiosity, the divine discontent, is the common source of the arts and sciences."

"think: poems fixed this landscape: Blake, Donne, Keats"

"Re-claiming, contextualizing, and interpreting their memories remain the historians' tasks. I am reminded of a line in William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence"-"To see a world in a grain of sand.""

"Freud was frank to admit that Romantic artists like Blake had discovered the unconscious before he had. But... he could hardly adopt Blake's unsettling view of the scientific psyche."

"Blake deeply admired science; he never failed to portray it heroically. But he was concerned that science saw the universe from an odd angle that hid as much as it revealed. Science screened the value of things, the beauty of things, the sacredness of things as if these qualities might not really be there. Blake called this Single Vision, and contrasted it with his ideal Fourfold vision: an understanding that included the poetic, the sensuous, and the visionary along with the rational. ...he fervently prayed for our culture to be saved from the scientist's severe abbreviation of reality: "God us keep from Single Vision and Newton's Sleep.""

"In the modern world, the Romantics were the last major cultural movement to assert the "truth of the imagination," defending art as a way of knowing the world that equalled or surpassed scientific reason. In their resistance to what Blake called "Satan's Mathematik Holiness," their goal was not to reject science but to enlarge it. ...the Romantics sought to understand by augmentation."

""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." As an angry child, often urged to "curb my temper," I used to ponder those words of William Blake, but they slid first into my memory through their repetitions of sound, their ominous rhythms."

"I think it was Blake's "The Tyger." I was given poems to copy, that was how my father taught me to do handwriting. "The Tyger" was one of them and it was so musical and mysterious. The wonderful image sank very deep very early. ("Do you remember the first poem that touched you deeply, that awakened you somehow?")"

"It is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as "revolutionary" — and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down — as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like "I wander through each charter'd street" than in three-quarters of Socialist literature."

"There is no century in which Blake would not have seen angels."

"I learned this bit of wisdom from a principle of William Blake's which I discovered early and followed far too assiduously the first half of my aesthetic life, and from which I have happily released myself and this axiom was: "Put off intellect and put on imagination; the imagination is the man." From this doctrinal assertion evolved the theoretical axiom that you don't see a thing until you look away from it which was an excellent truism as long as the principles of the imaginative life were believed in and followed. I no longer believe in the imagination."

"I also liked the Romantic poets. Wordsworth, Keats, Burns and Blake were some of my favourites. There was something about their rebellious spirit against the evils of industrialization that moved me. Of course now, some of their pessimism, mysticism and limited critical realist visions make me quite uncomfortable."

""Blake was among the first of European idealists to link his own traditions of thought" with the Indian classic..."

"To me, it seems best to read Blake in company with his truest peers, Shakespeare and Milton, and with his greatest contemporaries, Wordsworth and Shelley. He was a visionary, rather than a mystic, and, like D. H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud, he hoped to encourage us to exalt our human potential. Perhaps Blake can be best termed an apocalyptic humanist, who urges us never to forget that all deities reside in the human breast."