"Those who restrain their desires, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained"
About this Quote
Blake is poking a finger straight into the pieties of self-control, treating restraint not as virtue but as evidence. The line flips conventional morality with a sneer: if you can bottle a desire, maybe it was never that potent, never that real. In the clean, aphoristic cruelty of it, Blake turns temperance into a kind of physiological tell, a weakness posing as discipline.
The intent is less to glorify chaos than to indict a culture that confuses repression with righteousness. Blake’s subtext is psychological before the term existed: what gets praised as “restraint” often looks, from the inside, like fear of one’s own intensity. Desire here isn’t just appetite; it’s imaginative force, libido as creative energy, the fuel of art and revolt. If you prune it too neatly, you don’t become holy, you become smaller.
Context matters. Blake’s work repeatedly attacks the moral machinery of his era: churchly regulation, social conformity, the early Industrial imagination of humans as manageable units. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he famously insists that “Energy is Eternal Delight,” and this sentence sits in that orbit. It’s a provocation aimed at the respectable classes who equate order with goodness and treat the unruly parts of the self as sin to be managed.
It works because it weaponizes a moral compliment. “You’re so restrained,” society says. Blake hears: “You’re not tempted.” The insult is precise: your virtue may be nothing more than low voltage.
The intent is less to glorify chaos than to indict a culture that confuses repression with righteousness. Blake’s subtext is psychological before the term existed: what gets praised as “restraint” often looks, from the inside, like fear of one’s own intensity. Desire here isn’t just appetite; it’s imaginative force, libido as creative energy, the fuel of art and revolt. If you prune it too neatly, you don’t become holy, you become smaller.
Context matters. Blake’s work repeatedly attacks the moral machinery of his era: churchly regulation, social conformity, the early Industrial imagination of humans as manageable units. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he famously insists that “Energy is Eternal Delight,” and this sentence sits in that orbit. It’s a provocation aimed at the respectable classes who equate order with goodness and treat the unruly parts of the self as sin to be managed.
It works because it weaponizes a moral compliment. “You’re so restrained,” society says. Blake hears: “You’re not tempted.” The insult is precise: your virtue may be nothing more than low voltage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
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