Wit & Attitude Quote by William Blake

Blake turns “folly” from a moral failing into a method, and it’s classic Romantic provocation: wisdom doesn’t arrive by obeying respectable rules, it’s wrestled out of experience. The line (from Proverbs of Hell) sounds like a taunt aimed at the era’s clean, rational Enlightenment confidence. Persisting in folly isn’t a Hallmark defense of mistakes; it’s a dare to follow an impulse past the point where society labels it childish, sinful, or irrational. Blake’s bet is that sustained immersion exposes the limits of the impulse itself. You don’t quit because you were scolded into sense; you quit because you finally understand what the desire can and can’t deliver.

The subtext is anti-authoritarian and anti-performative. “The fool” isn’t just an idiot; it’s anyone dismissed as such by priests, polite moralists, or the social machinery that polices curiosity. By insisting on persistence, Blake rejects the shortcut of borrowed wisdom: secondhand virtue produces conformity, not insight. The phrasing also carries a sly irony: the very obstinacy that makes someone a “fool” becomes the engine of their education. Folly, pushed to its extreme, reveals its own consequences, and that confrontation is what converts heat into light.

Context matters: Blake is writing against a culture of restraint, industrial discipline, and spiritual bookkeeping. His “hell” is less a literal pit than a space of energy, appetite, and imagination. The line works because it reframes error as apprenticeship and turns the scolding voice of “common sense” into the real target.