Life & Wisdom Quote by William Blake

Cosmic bodies don’t “doubt,” and that’s precisely Blake’s provocation: he smuggles a moral psychology into the sky. The line hits like a nursery rhyme with a blade inside it. By giving the Sun and Moon an inner life, Blake turns self-trust into a law of nature, not a self-help slogan. The threat is instant and absolute: doubt doesn’t merely dim you; it extinguishes you. “Immediately” is doing brutal work here, compressing cause and effect into a single catastrophic click.

Blake’s intent isn’t to romanticize confidence so much as to dramatize what he saw as the spiritual stakes of perception. This is the poet who distrusted the era’s rising cult of cold reason when it calcified into cynicism. Doubt, in Blake’s cosmology, is less healthy skepticism than a corrosive disbelief in vision itself. If your imagination - your capacity to see meaning, divinity, possibility - hesitates, the world goes dark because you’ve lost the organ that makes light legible.

The subtext also carries an artist’s self-portrait. For a working poet and engraver on the margins of respectable culture, doubt wasn’t abstract; it was economic, social, reputational. Keep shining, keep reflecting - don’t ask permission from the age’s accountants.

Context matters: Blake writes in a period of revolution, industrial churn, and Enlightenment confidence curdling into exploitation. He answers that pressure with a mystical physics: light is not just something you receive; it’s something you must dare to generate.