Life & Wisdom Quote by William Blake

Blake comes out swinging: the mind that refuses to move doesn not stay pure, it goes rancid. The image does the heavy lifting. "Standing water" is not neutral; it is a warning sign. It looks calm, even respectable, but its stillness is exactly what makes it dangerous. In one stroke, Blake takes the pose of steadfastness - so often praised as integrity - and flips it into a pathology.

The line is calibrated to make "never alters his opinions" feel less like moral conviction and more like fear: fear of contradiction, of being seen as inconsistent, of admitting you were wrong. Blake is not celebrating trend-chasing. He is attacking the ego that mistakes rigidity for strength. The "reptiles of the mind" are the thoughts that thrive in that sealed environment: suspicion, prejudice, rote slogans, paranoid certainties, the kind of mental life that can survive without evidence because it never has to encounter oxygen.

Context matters because Blake wrote in an age when opinion was being industrialized: the Enlightenment's systems, the growing authority of institutions, the churn of political revolution and reaction. He distrusted any worldview that hardened into a machine, whether church dogma or "rational" orthodoxy. The intent isn't polite self-improvement; it's prophetic hygiene. Change, for Blake, is not a mood. It's the condition of a living imagination. Refuse to revise, and you don't just get stuck; you start to rot.