John Milton Quotes

606 Sourced Quotes

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

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

John Milton
To be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.

John Milton
Unless an age too late, or cold Climate, or years damp my intended wing.

John Milton
Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.

John Milton
Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv'st unseen
Within thy airy shell
By slow Meander's margent green,
And in the violet-embroidered vale.

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

John Milton
Revenge, at first though sweet, Bitter ere long back on itself recoils.

John Milton
But he, though blind of sight,
Despised, and thought extinguished quite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
[...]
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows now third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird, ages of lives.

John Milton
With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons, and their change; all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds.

John Milton
Who overcomes
By force, hath overcome but half his foe.

John Milton
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night.

John Milton
Anon they move
In perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft recorders.

John Milton
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
For contemplation he and valour formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace,
He for God only, she for God in him.

John Milton
…What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?

John Milton
With a smile that glow'd Celestial rosy red, love's proper hue.

John Milton
How gladly would I meet mortality, my sentence, and be earth in sensible! How glad would lay me down, as in my mother's lap! There I should rest, and sleep secure.

John Milton
His spear, to equal which the tallest pine Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast Of some great ammiral, were but a wand, He walk'd with, to support uneasy steps Over the burning marle.

John Milton
The land had once enfranchised herself from this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish.

John Milton
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

John Milton
The childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day.

John Milton
Fairy elves, Whose midnight revels by a forest side Or fountain some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon Sits arbitress.

John Milton
Whence and what art thou, execrable shape?

John Milton
Then lies him down the lubber fiend,
And stretched out all the chimney's length,
Basks at the fire his hairy strength.

John Milton
The sun...
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.

John Milton
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

John Milton
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain.

John Milton
But pain is perfect misery, the worst Of evils, and excessive, overturns All patience.

John Milton
He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.

John Milton