Life & Wisdom Quote by William Blake

Blake doesn’t romanticize “energy” as mere pep; he treats it as a moral and spiritual force, a kind of holy combustion. “Eternal delight” is doing double duty: it’s pleasure, yes, but also proof of vitality, the sign that life is meant to move, make, risk, and remake. In Blake’s universe, the opposite of virtue isn’t sin so much as paralysis.

The line turns vicious when it pivots to “he who desires, but acts not.” Desire, for Blake, is not a private daydream; it’s a claim on the self. To want intensely and then refuse the world that wanting implies is to turn the appetite inward until it curdles. “Breeds pestilence” is a deliberately bodily threat: repression doesn’t just make you sad, it makes you sick, and not only individually. Pestilence spreads. The unacted life becomes contagious resentment, moralizing, hypocrisy - all the social pathogens of a culture that mistakes restraint for righteousness.

Context matters: Blake is writing against the grain of his age’s respectability - the industrial, churchy, buttoned-up Britain that celebrated order while grinding people down. His contrarian edge is theological as much as political. He’s not saying “do whatever you want”; he’s saying that creativity and action are how the soul stays honest. The subtext is a warning: when a society trains people to desire quietly and comply loudly, it doesn’t get peace. It gets rot disguised as virtue.