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Degrade first the arts if you'd mankind degrade,
Hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.

— William Blake

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Art

More quotes by William Blake

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

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.

Milton (1809)

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.

Songs of Experience (1794)

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

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

All William Blake quotes →

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Blake (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.