1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. John Milton

John Milton Quotes
page 2

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost , written in blank verse.

Milton's poetry and prose reflect deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. Writing in English, Latin, Greek, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica , written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of free speech and freedom of the press.

William Hayley's 1796 biography called him the "greatest English author", and he remains generally regarded "as one of the preeminent writers in the English language", though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death . Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as "a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind", though he described Milton's politics as those of an "acrimonious and surly republican".



✵ 9. December 1608 – 8. November 1674
John Milton photo
John Milton: 190   quotes 18   likes

John Milton Quotes

“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.”

John Milton book Areopagitica

Source: Areopagitica

“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”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

Death , World , Tree , Singing

“Thou art my father, thou my author, thou my being gav'st me; whom should I obey but thee, whom follow?”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

Art

“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.”

John Milton

Attributed to Milton at http://quotationsbook.com/quote/31964/#sthash.zAJjMqmY.dpbs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverence_(emotion)#Quotations, great-quotes.com, and brainyquote.com.
Spirituality author Sarah Ban Breathnach writes, in her 1996 Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude: "Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life (is it abundant or is it lacking?) and the world (is it friendly or is it hostile?)." A Milton quotation occurs on the same page.
Misattributed

Life , World , Change , Gratitude

“So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good.”

John Milton
Fear , Hope , Evil

“Neither man nor angel can discern hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible except to God alone.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

God , Angels , Evil

“To be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

Suffering

“Still paying, still to owe.
Eternal woe!”

John Milton

“So shall the world go on,
To good malignant, to bad men benign,
Under her own weight groaning.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

Men , World

“Then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

“Heaven is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise.
Think only what concerns thee and thy being;
Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there
Live, in what state, condition, or degree,
Contented that thus far hath been revealed.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

World , Dreams , Thinking

“Silence was pleased.”

John Milton
Silence

“One sip of this will bathe the drooping spirits in delight, beyond the bliss of dreams.”

John Milton Comus

Source: Comus

Dreams

“The stars, that nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps with everlasting oil, give due light to the misled and lonely traveler".”

John Milton
Travel , Star , Nature , Light

“But oh! as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”

John Milton

On His Deceased Wife (c. 1658)

Night

“Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race:
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace;
And glut thyself with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more than what is false and vain,
And merely mortal dross.”

John Milton

On Time (1633–34)

Time , Speed , Falseness , Flying

“I shall detain you no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but straight conduct ye to a hillside, where I will point ye out the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious indeed at the 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.”

John Milton

Tractate of Education (1644)

Education

“From haunted spring and dale
Edged with poplar pale
The parting genius is with sighing sent.”

John Milton On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

Hymn, stanza 20, line 184
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629)

Spring , Parting

“Madam, methinks I see him living yet;
So well your words his noble virtues praise,
That all both judge you to relate them true,
And to possess them, honour'd Margaret.”

John Milton

To the Lady Margaret Ley http://www.bartleby.com/106/85.html

“By labor and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.”

John Milton

The Reason of Church Government (1641), Book II, Introduction

Life , Nature , Study , Strong

“They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through EDEN took thir solitarie way.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

x.1532-40
Paradise Lost (1667)

World , Way , Nature , Tear

“Have hung
My dank and dropping weeds
To the stern god of sea.”

John Milton

Translation of Horace. Book i. Ode 5

God , Sea

“Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy”

John Milton

At a Solemn Music (c. 1637), line 1

Joy

“Be frustrate, all ye stratagems of Hell,
And devilish machinations come to nought.”

John Milton Paradise Regained

Book I: Lines 72-73
Paradise Regained (1671)

Hell

“The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground.”

John Milton

Sonnet VIII: When the Assault was intended to the City

Housing

“For stories teach us, that liberty sought out of season, in a corrupt and degenerate age, brought Rome itself to a farther slavery: for liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands: neither is it completely given, but by them who have the happy skill to know what is grievance and unjust to a people, and how to remove it wisely; what good laws are wanting, and how to frame them substantially, that good men may enjoy the freedom which they merit, and the bad the curb which they need.”

John Milton

The Prose Works of John Milton, Volume II, Book III. http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Milton0174/ProseWorks/HTMLs/0233-02_Pt08b_LongParliament.html (1847)

Men , People , Age , Law

“Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.”

John Milton

On His Deceased Wife (c. 1658)

“O fairest flower! no sooner blown but blasted,
Soft silken primrose fading timelessly.”

John Milton

Ode on the Death of a fair Infant, dying of a Cough, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Flowers

“Attic tragedies of stateliest and most regal argument.”

John Milton

Tractate of Education (1644)

“Mirth, admit me of thy crew,
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreprovèd pleasures free.”

John Milton

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 38

Pleasure

“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.”

John Milton

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 127; comparable to: "Wisdom married to immortal verse", William Wordsworth, The Excursion, book vii

Youth , Dreams , Soul , Learning

“Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.”

John Milton

The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Preface: "TO THE PARLAMENT OF ENGLAND" https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/ddd/parliament/text.shtml (1643)

Forgetting

“Of which all Europe rings from side to side.”

John Milton

To Cyriack Skinner, upon His Blindness (c. 1655)

“Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms,
Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize,
If ever deed of honour did thee please,
Guard them, and him within protect from harms.”

John Milton

Sonnet VIII: When the Assault was Intended to the City

Chance

“I walk unseen
On the dry smooth-shaven green,
To behold the wandering moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heav'n's wide pathless way,
And oft, as if her head she bowed,
Stooping through a fleecy cloud.”

John Milton

Source: Il Penseroso (1631), Line 65

Way

“The oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.”

John Milton On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

Hymn, stanza 19, line 173
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629)

“But, O sad Virgin, that thy power
Might raise Musaeus from his bower,
Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing
Such notes as warbled to the string,
Drew Iron tears down Pluto’s cheek,
And made Hell grant what Love did seek.”

John Milton

Source: Il Penseroso (1631), Line 105

Love , Sadness , Soul , Hell

“Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 156

World

“Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.”

John Milton

The Reason of Church Government, Introduction, Book ii

Truth , Study

“He knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 10

Singing

“Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 163

Angels

“Meadows trim, with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide;
Towers and balements it sees
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The cynosure of neighboring eyes.”

John Milton

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 75

Beauty , Tree

“For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed;
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 166

Star , Dead

“And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.”

John Milton

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 67

“Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?”

John Milton

The History of England (1670), Book IV

War , Fight

“The end of learning is to know God, and out of that knowledge to love Him and imitate Him.”

John Milton

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 364

Love , God , Knowledge , Learning

“Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam.”

John Milton

The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), Introduction. Compare: "The sun, which passeth through pollutions and itself remains as pure as before", Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book ii (1605)

Truth

“When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless.”

John Milton

On His Blindness (1652)

Death , World , Light

“Time will run back and fetch the Age of Gold.”

John Milton On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

Hymn, stanza 14, line 135
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629)

Age , Time