Life & Wisdom Quote by William Blake

Blake’s line lands like a moral crime scene: a cradle, an infant, and a command that sounds monstrous until you realize the “infant” is a desire still small enough to be stopped. The violence is the point. Blake isn’t praising brutality; he’s staging an intervention against self-deception. “Nurse” is the dagger here, turning care into complicity. To nurse an “unacted desire” is to cultivate a private tyranny: you keep feeding the thing that will later feed on you.

The intent is characteristically Blakean: attack the soft, respectable habits that pass for virtue. Repression, in his view, isn’t self-control; it’s delayed damage. The unacted desire doesn’t disappear, it curdles into resentment, hypocrisy, or cruelty disguised as principle. So he flips the usual moral script. Society tells you to cradle your forbidden impulses in silence, call it decency, and congratulate yourself for not doing anything. Blake calls that the real danger: an interior life run by longing that never meets the world honestly.

Context matters: Blake’s poetry is a sustained argument with the pieties of his age - church-sanctioned restraint, Enlightenment “reason” as a moral hall pass, the idea that being good means being tidy inside. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he insists that energy and desire are not embarrassments to be managed but forces to be recognized and transformed. The shock tactic is rhetorical, almost prophetic: better a clean cut than a lifetime of quiet poisoning. The line doesn’t counsel impulse; it demands responsibility for what you want, before it becomes destiny.