Life & Wisdom Quote by William Blake

Blake doesn’t call the world a “fiction” to float some cozy relativism; he’s weaponizing imagination against the era’s most self-satisfied certainty. Coming out of an England drunk on Enlightenment “reason,” industrial progress, and tidy moral accounting, Blake insists that what passes for reality is already a story: a stitched-together narrative enforced by church, state, and the new machinery of commerce. “Do what you will” lands like a dare and a warning at once, a jab at the fantasy of stable rules. Try to live cleanly by a single system - rationalism, piety, patriotism, even rebellion - and the world will contradict you.

The line works because it refuses the comforting posture of diagnosis. Blake doesn’t say the world contains contradictions; he says it is made of them, as if conflict isn’t a bug in existence but its raw material. That’s a deeply Blakean move: he builds meaning out of “contraries” (innocence and experience, heaven and hell) and treats tension as the engine of perception. If reality is “fiction,” then the stakes shift. The real question becomes: who’s writing the script, and what gets edited out to keep power looking natural?

Read in context of Blake’s prophetic books and his suspicion of “single vision,” the quote is less nihilistic than insurgent. It grants permission to distrust the official story and to accept paradox without paralysis. In an age of slogans and algorithms that reward consistency over truth, Blake’s contradiction feels less like a poetic flourish than a survival skill.