“No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.”
Documented source
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About this line
The line is one of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” — deliberate inversions written to upend polite wisdom while revolution was in the air across the Channel. Its claim is simple and defiant: height was never the danger. Borrowed wings are. Trust your own and there’s no such thing as too high.
Why we carry this line
The only permission you actually need, written two centuries before the self-help shelf. I read it and understood immediately. Go your own way. (A Fleetwood Mac hat tip)
The design
SOARS is the biggest word by far, set in warm matte gold with “No bird” small above it. The bird is small. The soaring isn’t.
On the mug and the journal, SOARS sits between two thin rules. On the tee, the rules come off and the word stands on its own.
What happened next
Blake put this line in a book he made with his own hands. Around 1790 he etched The Marriage of Heaven and Hell onto copper plates, then printed and colored each copy himself.
No two copies match. He printed one in yellow ochre and another in shades of green, and he kept reworking the book for years.
He was still printing it in 1827, nearly forty years after the first copy.
