Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.

Something new!  I’d not seen this one before, and had to go look it up.  Sounds a little bit like Shakespeare, but I don’t know, something about the meter (DUH da DUH da DUH da DUH) was too bouncy to be Shakespeare’s style, even in the long poems where sometimes quotes hide that don’t have the same feeling as those that come from the plays.

Anyway, this one is from William Blake if Google Books is any indicator:

[Source]

I think that my favorite source of misinformation comes from the two-fer on this Yahoo! Answers page.

First we have the answer that, “William Blake borrowed it from Shakespeare, who wrote it in one of his sonnets.”  No mention of which sonnet, of course, and it’s not iambic pentameter.  It’s very easy to check and cite references.  But under “source” the person wrote, “I am a Shakespeare teacher.” Just not a good one I guess.

The second bit of genius comes from the well-meaning person who writes, “I searched and couldn’t find it as anything but a quote so maybe it’s something he never wrote down, only said.”  That’s not the first time I’ve heard that, and it conjures up this hysterical image in my brain of the town drunk passing down his story over the centuries.  “So there I am, sitting next to the Bard of Avon himself William Shakespeare, telling him my problems with women. And you know what he does? He turns to me and says, he says, ‘Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined.’ And I says to him I says, ‘Pal, you need to write that down.’  Well I guess he plum forgot because it doesn’t show up in any of his recorded works, but I swear to you, he said it. I was there.”  Imagine Bill Murray telling his Dalai Lama story in Caddyshack. 🙂