William Blake quotes
1757 – 1827 · England, late 18th–early 19th century · Poet, painter and printmaker
About William Blake
Born and died in London, Blake combined text and image to convey a personal, visionary theology. Key works include Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Some sayings commonly linked to him are disputed and appear to be later misattributions.
Works: Songs of Innocence and of Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Quotes
“There are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”
Source: no specific work is documented · Check the source
Disputed attributionWhat we know
- What is documented
- Quote investigators report no evidence for this wording in Blake and trace a similar formulation to Ray Manzarek, cited in Newsweek (c.1967).
- What remains uncertain
- The attribution to Blake is likely apocryphal; similarity to Blake’s authentic «doors of perception» line seems to have encouraged the false credit.
The image of «doors» frames knowing as a threshold—what we perceive determines what we can know. The exact wording, however, is not found in Blake; it likely owes its form to later rock‑era paraphrases that echo Blake’s famous line about the doors of perception.