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“What Saith thy Conscience?—“Thou shalt become what thou art.””
The line frames conscience as a demand to develop into one’s own character rather than merely conforming to an externally supplied identity.
Source note: The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 270; Thomas Common translation. The formula has a longer classical and Nietzschean history, so this record is tied specifically to this occurrence.
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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.
Source identified
“We shall never learn the affinities of beauty”
Stevenson treats beauty as deeper than any complete technical explanation, warning that analysis of artistic mechanism does not exhaust why form can move or delight.
Source note: Essays in the Art of Writing, “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature,” represented by the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition in Project Gutenberg #492. The collection is posthumous; the excerpt concerns literary aesthetics.
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“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”
Pater uses music as his model for the closest possible union of form and content, a critical claim about artistic structure rather than a literal hierarchy of media.
Source note: The Renaissance, “The School of Giorgione”; Project Gutenberg #2398. The surrounding paragraph explains that other arts strive to reduce the separation between matter and form.
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“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
The famous closing joins beauty and truth in a deliberately compressed claim that continues to invite debate rather than a single easy reading.
Source note: “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” closing lines.
Source identified
“We, however, want to be the poets of our life, and first of all in the smallest and most commonplace matters.”
The line extends artistic perception into ordinary conduct, suggesting that a life can be shaped through attention to small, repeated choices rather than only dramatic acts.
Source note: The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 299; Thomas Common translation in the represented 1910 English edition.