Life & Wisdom Quote by William Blake

Blake takes a knife to the tidy borders we draw around “things.” Not “if a person loves,” but if a thing loves: an object, a creature, a soul, a work of art, a grain of sand. He’s collapsing categories on purpose, insisting that love isn’t just a human mood but a force that re-sizes whatever it inhabits. The grammar is deceptively plain, almost like a child’s maxim, and that’s part of the trick: the line reads like common sense until you notice how radically it rewires the universe.

The intent is mystical, but not hazy. Blake is arguing that infinity isn’t an abstract mathematical skybox; it’s a condition produced by relationship. Love, in this formulation, doesn’t decorate the finite world, it breaks it open. Once a “thing” loves, it exceeds its boundaries: it becomes more than its material limits, more than its role, more than its name. The subtext is a rebuke to Enlightenment rationalism and the era’s growing faith in measurement, classification, and industrial utility. You can count a thing, price it, put it in a system - but if it loves, it won’t stay put.

Context matters: Blake’s whole project was to rehabilitate vision against the deadening machinery of reason and empire. He’s writing in the shadow of revolutions and factories, where bodies are turned into inputs and nature into resource. “Infinite” becomes both consolation and provocation: the smallest life can be immeasurable, and any world that treats it as merely finite is spiritually illiterate.