Life & Wisdom Quote by William Blake

Blake is doing something sly here: he turns holiness from a church-owned commodity into an electrical property of existence itself. “For everything that lives is holy” reads like a creed, but it’s also a provocation aimed at the moral bookkeeping of his era, where sanctity was rationed out to the respectable and the saved. Blake collapses the hierarchy. Not just humans, not just the properly pious: everything that lives. Holiness becomes less about behavior and more about being.

The second clause is the quiet masterstroke. “Life delights in life” is not argument so much as an insistence on mutual recognition. It’s a line that treats vitality as self-affirming, even contagious, a force that wants more of itself in the world. Underneath, you can hear Blake’s impatience with systems that train people to distrust desire, body, appetite, pleasure - anything that looks like unlicensed joy. If life delights in life, then cruelty, repression, and exploitation aren’t merely political wrongs; they’re metaphysical violations, acts against the grain of reality.

Context matters: Blake wrote against the backdrop of industrialization, empire, and a moral culture that could preach virtue while tolerating child labor and poverty. His radical spirituality offers an alternative to both cold rationalism and punitive religion: a vision where the sacred isn’t distant, it’s densely present. The line works because it’s plainspoken and totalizing, a miniature cosmology delivered with the calm certainty of a blessing and the implicit threat of a rebuke.