Parenting & Family Quote by William Blake

Blake frames experience as a market transaction, then immediately poisons the fantasy of a bargain. The opening questions sound almost playful, like a street performer’s patter: surely we can pick up wisdom the way we pick up a tune. But the cadence snaps shut on the word “No,” and suddenly the metaphor turns brutal. Experience is not acquired through charming public rituals (“a song,” “a dance in the street”) but through private loss. That’s the pivot Blake cares about: the culture sells the idea that maturity is an aesthetic upgrade, when in reality it’s often an extraction.

The language of purchase matters. “Price” and “bought” drag the reader into an economy where the self is collateral. Blake isn’t just saying that suffering teaches; he’s indicting a world that demands suffering as tuition. “All the man hath” echoes biblical phrasing, giving the line a scriptural authority while also making it sound like a legal inventory. House, wife, children: the nouns are domestic, ordinary, almost ledger-like. Wisdom doesn’t arrive as enlightenment so much as foreclosure.

Context sharpens the sting. Blake wrote against the grain of Enlightenment optimism and the era’s polite confidence in progress. In his universe, “Experience” is a state defined by compromise, injury, and the institutional pressures of class, church, and industry. The subtext is not self-help but warning: if you want the world’s version of wisdom, understand what it will ask you to surrender. The quote works because it stages temptation, then reveals the hidden invoice.