John Milton Quotes

English poet and civil servant (1608–1674)

John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is most famous for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), written in blank verse.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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

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

What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
Of Attic taste?

License they mean when they cry, Liberty!
For who loves that must first be wise and good.

That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp.

That old man eloquent.

As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye.

Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day.

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

Such as may make thee search the coffers round.

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

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.

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.

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?

[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.