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“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.
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“Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness”
The continuation imagines beauty as something whose value can deepen in memory and imagination rather than simply fading with the moment.
Source note: Endymion, Book I; Project Gutenberg #24280. The line directly continues “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” and belongs to the poem’s idealizing Romantic account of beauty.
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“With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.”
Language is remembered as opening several capacities at once—thought, hope and a fuller experience of living—rather than merely adding a vocabulary item.
Source note: Optimism: An Essay (1903), Project Gutenberg #31622. Keller is reflecting on her own early experience of language and education.
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“Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart.”
Sustained ideals can organize attention and effort, giving a person a picture of the kind of life or work they intend to build.
Source note: As a Man Thinketh, chapter “Visions and Ideals”; this is an excerpt from Allen’s longer exhortation to remain true to constructive ideals.
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“my imagination “paints yet more glorious triumphs on the cloud-curtain of the future.””
The closing image makes imagination a creative way of envisioning a better future, using painterly language to express hope rather than prediction.
Source note: Optimism: An Essay (1903), Project Gutenberg #31622. The quotation marks are Keller’s; the image belongs to the essay’s concluding vision of optimism.
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“In a word, literature is my Utopia.”
Books give Keller a realm of freedom and belonging in which physical barriers matter less than imagination, language, and thought.
Source note: The Story of My Life; Keller summarizes the central place of literature in her intellectual life.