What does this quote mean?

“What is now proved was once only imagined.”

Blake’s proverb compresses a recurring imaginative pattern: possibilities can exist first as conceived ideas before later work, discovery or demonstration makes some of them real or provable.

Source note: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell,” represented by Project Gutenberg #45315 at printed page 16. Gutenberg regularizes the line to “imagined”; Blake’s engraved text is often transcribed with historical spelling and punctuation. The proverb is part of Blake’s deliberately paradoxical infernal-wisdom sequence, not a literal claim that every imagined thing will eventually be proved.

“We hear only the questions to which we are capable of finding an answer.”

The aphorism suggests that inquiry is limited by the conceptual capacities of the person asking, making intellectual growth partly a matter of becoming able to formulate and recognize better questions.

Source note: The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 196; Thomas Common translation.

“Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”

James describes theories as tools for moving inquiry and experience forward rather than final intellectual resting places that eliminate the need for further testing or revision.

Source note: Pragmatism, Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means”; Project Gutenberg #5116. Capitalization has been normalized from the represented all-caps sentence while the wording is otherwise preserved.

“Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.”

James presents pragmatism as a method that makes theories answer to practical consequences and experience instead of allowing abstract formulations to remain rigid and self-sufficient.

Source note: Pragmatism, Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means”; Project Gutenberg #5116. The sentence follows James’s claim that theories become instruments rather than final answers.

“Partial knowledge is more triumphant than complete knowledge; it takes things to be simpler than they are.”

The warning is that simplified partial explanations can spread more easily precisely because they remove the complications that fuller understanding would have to preserve.

Source note: Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 578, “Partial Knowledge”; Helen Zimmern translation; sentence shortened before the final clause about popularity and persuasion.

“To define is to limit.”

Definitions clarify ideas but can also narrow them, especially when a label is treated as the complete reality of a person or experience.

Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 17; Lord Henry answers the Duchess of Monmouth’s question “What are you?” with “To define is to limit.”