Top 782 Quotes & Sayings by John Milton - Page 4

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.

A beardless cynic is the shame of nature.

Ink is the blood of the printing-press.

Yet much remains To conquer still; peace hath her victories No less renowned then war, new foes arise Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains: Help us to save free conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.

Incens'd with indignation Satan stood Unterrify'd, and like a comet burn'd That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In th' arctic sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war.

Th' ethereal mould Incapable of stain would soon expel Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire, Victorious. Thus repuls'd, our final hope Is flat despair.

Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy.

Seas wept from our deep sorrows.

It is not good that man should be alone. ... Hitherto all things that have been named, were approved of God to be very good: loneliness is the first thing which God's eye named not good: whether it be a thing, or the want of something, I labour not.

Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names.

Bacchus, that first from out the purple grape Crush'd the sweet poison of misused wine.

For evil news rides post, while good news baits.

Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross.

Till old experience do attain To something like prophetic strain.

So dear I love him, that with him, all deaths I could endure, without him, live no life.

And sing to those that hold the vital shears; And turn the adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound.

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste/Brought death into the world, and all our woe,/With loss of Eden, till one greater Man/Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,/Sing heavenly muse

Thus with the year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine.

[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, ... as have also long since our best English tragedies, as... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.

Now came still evening on, and twilight gray Had in her sober livery all things clad; Silence accompany'd; for beast and bird, They to their grassy couch, these to their nests, Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale; She all night long her amorous descant sung; Silence was pleas'd. Now glow'd the firmament With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon, Rising in clouded majesty, at length Apparent queen unveil'd her peerless light, And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, As one great furnace, flamed; yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Serv'd only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all; but torture without end.

Arm the obdured breast with stubborn patience as with triple steel.

Hide me from day's garish eye.

Anger and just rebuke, and judgment given, That brought into this world a world of woe, Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery, Death's harbinger.

And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry, Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild, And ever, against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse Such as the meeting soul may pierce, In notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them....I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

Farewell happy fields, Where joy forever dwells: Hail, horrors, hail.

The Angel ended, and in Adam's ear So charming left his voice, that he awhile Thought him still speaking, still stood fix'd to hear.

Promiscuous reading is necessary to the constituting of human nature. The attempt to keep out evil doctrine by licensing is like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to keep out the crows by shutting the park gate.

That power Which erring men call Chance.

These two imparadised in one another's arms, the happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill of bliss on bliss.

The teachers of our law, and to propose What might improve my knowledge or their own.

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain! Blind among enemies, O worse than chains, dungeon or beggary, or decrepit age! Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct, and all her various objects of delight annulled, which might in part my grief have eased. Inferior to the vilest now become of man or worm; the vilest here excel me, they creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed to daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong, within doors, or without, still as a fool, in power of others, never in my own; scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.

Hail, holy light! offspring of heaven firstborn! Or of th' eternal co-eternal beam, May I express thee unblam'd? since God is light And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate!

Still paying, still to owe. Eternal woe!

Swinish gluttony never looks to heaven amidst its gorgeous feast; but with besotted, base ingratitude, cravens and blasphemes his feeder.

I will point ye out the right path of a virtuous and noble Education; laborious indeed at first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect, and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming.

Enflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.

Pandemonium, the high capital Of Satan and his peers.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

O welcome pure-eyed Faith, white handed Hope, Thou hovering angel girt with golden wings.

So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity, That, when a soul is found sincerely so, A thousand liveried angels lacky her, Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt.

He alone is worthy of the appellation who either does great things, or teaches how they may be done, or describes them with a suitable majesty when they have been done; but those only are great things which tend to render life more happy, which increase the innocent enjoyments and comforts of existence, or which pave the way to a state of future bliss more permanent and more pure.

Him that yon soars on golden wing, guiding the fiery-wheelèd throne, the Cherub Contemplation.

Fame is the last infirmity of the human mind.

I hate when vice can bolt her arguments, And virtue has no tongue to check her pride.

And that must end us, that must be our cure: To be no more. Sad cure! For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish, rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night Devoid of sense and motion?

Heav'nly love shall outdoo Hellish hate

God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person, more that the restraint of ten vicious.

Those whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale gessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.

To adore the conqueror, who now beholds Cherub and seraph rolling in the flood.

Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss

What honour that, But tedious waste of time, to sit and hear So many hollow compliments and lies.

The work under our labour grows, Luxurious by restraint.

Justice divine Mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries.

Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself.

He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

No date prefixed directs me in the starry rubric set.

The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.