Life & Wisdom Quote by William Blake

Blake flips the moral panic around copying into a provocation: the amateur merely looks derivative; the real artist commits the theft so completely that it stops reading as theft. The sting is in “seems” versus “really does.” “Seems” is surface mimicry, the kind of anxious pastiche that wants the audience to notice its influences because it has nothing sturdier to offer. “Really does” is deeper and, in Blake’s framing, more honest: the good artist doesn’t just borrow a style, they absorb a lineage, dismantle it, and rebuild it as a new instrument.

The subtext is Blake’s lifelong war against polite standards of “originality,” a category that, in his era, was hardening into a cultural virtue alongside emerging ideas of intellectual property. As an engraver and poet working outside the respectable institutions, he understood how “genius” gets policed: the gatekeepers praise originality while quietly rewarding those who reproduce approved forms. His line exposes that hypocrisy. All art is made from prior art; what matters is whether the borrowing is inert or metabolized.

It also smuggles in a spiritual claim. For Blake, imagination isn’t a private diary entry; it’s a visionary faculty tapping something older than the self. To “really” copy the greats is to enter their current, not to cosplay their gestures. The quote works because it refuses piety about influence and dares you to admit the obvious: transformation starts with surrender.