Table of contents

1 John Milton (1608 - 1674) 2 Paradise Lost 3 Areopagitica 4 External links

John Milton (1608 - 1674)

poet

• The childhood shows the man,
  As morning shows the day.
  • Paradise Regained Book 4 Line 220

• Just are the ways of God,
  And justifiable to men;
  Unless there be who think not God at all.
  • Samson Agonistes Line 293

• He’s gone, and who knows how he may report
  Thy words by adding fuel to the flame?
  • Samson Agonistes Line 1350

• Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam.
  • Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce

• They also serve who only stand and waite.
  • On His Blindness

Paradise Lost

• The mind is its own place, and in itself
  Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
  • Book 1 Line 254

• Here at last we shall be free; the Almighty hath not built. Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice to reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."

• "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."
  • Book1 Line 263 The writer Neil Gaiman in the Season of Mists portion of his San∂man series, has Lucifer repudiate this assertion by saying "We didn't say it. Milton said it. And he was blind."

• Who overcomes
  By force, hath overcome but half his foe.
  • Book 1 Line 648

• Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
  From heaven; for ev’n in heaven his looks and thoughts
  Were always downward bent, admiring more
  The riches of heaven’s pavement, trodden gold,
  Than aught divine or holy else enjoy’d
  In vision beatific.
  • Book 1 Line 679

• Long is the way
  And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.
  • Book 2 Line 432

• I made him just and right,
  Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
  • Book 3 Line 99

• Which way shall I fly
  Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
  Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
  And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
  Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
  To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
  • Book 4 Line 73

• Grace was in all her steps, heaven in her eye,
  In every gesture dignity and love.
  • Book 8 Line 488

• Accuse not Nature: she hath done her part;
  Do thou but thine.
  • Book 8 Line 561

• Revenge, at first though sweet,
  Bitter ere long back on itself recoils.
  • Book 9 Line 171

Areopagitica

• As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

• Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

• We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

• Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks

• There is yet behind of what I purposed to lay open, the incredible loss and detriment that this plot of licensing puts us to; more than if some enemy at sea should stop up all our havens and ports and creeks, it hinders and retards the importation of our richest merchandise, truth.

• He who thinks we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of reformation that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show us, till we come to beatific vision, that man by this very opinion declares that he is yet far short of truth.

External links