John Milton
The very essence of truth is plainness and brightness; the darkness and crookedness is our own. The wisdom of God created understanding, fit and proportionable to truth, the object and end of it, as the eye to the thing visible. If our understanding have a film of ignorance over it, or be blear with gazing on other false glitterings, what is that to truth?Collection: Truth
What am I pondering, you ask? So help me God, immortality.Collection: Helping
Justice divine Mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries.Collection: Prayer
Who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whisper softness in chambers?Collection: Air
Among unequals what society Can sort, what harmony, or true delight?Collection: Society
Still paying, still to owe. Eternal woe!Collection: Woe
The work under our labour grows, Luxurious by restraint.Collection: Work
Those whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supremeCollection: Peace
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?Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Art
God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person, more that the restraint of ten vicious.Collection: Growth
When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation. For what do terms used without skill or meaning, which are at once corrupt and misapplied, denote but a people listless, supine, and ripe for servitude?Collection: Country
They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness.Collection: Eye
Our torments also may in length of time Become our Elements.Collection: Time
What need a man forestall his date of grief, And run to meet what he would most avoid?.Collection: Running
Innumerable as the stars of night, Or stars of morning, dewdrops which the sun Impearls on every leaf and every flower.Collection: Morning
It is lawful and hath been held so through all ages for any one who have the power to call to account a tyrant or wicked king, and after due conviction to depose and put him to death.Collection: Kings
Knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled.Collection: Book
Wherefore did he [God] create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?Collection: Passion
Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon/ Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage./ Far off from these a slow and silent stream,/ Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls/ Her wat'ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,/ Forthwith his former state and being forgets,/ Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.Collection: Pain
No institution which does not continually test its ideals, techniques and measure of accomplishment can claim real vitality.Collection: Real
how wearisom Eternity so spent in worship paid To whom we hate. Let us not then pursue By force impossible, by leave obtain'd Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek Our own good from our selves, and from our own Live to our selves, though in this vast recess, Free, and to none accountable, preferring Hard liberty before the easie yoke Of servile PompCollection: Hate
No mighty trance, or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.Collection: Cells
So he with difficulty and labour hard Mov'd on, with difficulty and labour he.Collection: Difficulty
I sat me down to watch upon a bank With ivy canopied and interwove With flaunting honeysuckle.Collection: Ivy
It is Chastity, my brother. She that has that is clad in complete steel.Collection: Brother
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.Collection: Book
Beauty is Nature's coin, must not be hoarded, But must be current, and the good thereof Consists in mutual and partaken bliss.Collection: Beautiful
What wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? 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.Collection: Christian
If it come to prohibiting, there is aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.Collection: Ifs
Fairest of stars, last in the train of night, If better thou belong not to the dawn.Collection: Stars
And add to these retired Leisure, That in trim gardens take his pleasure.Collection: Garden
[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.Collection: Italian
But hail thou Goddess sage and holy, Hail, divinest Melancholy, Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight, And therefore to our weaker view O'erlaid with black, staid Wisdom's hue.Collection: Sight
If weakness may excuse, What murderer, what traitor, parricide, Incestuous, sacrilegious, but may plead it? All wickedness is weakness; that plea, therefore, With God or man will gain thee no remission.Collection: Men
Hide me from day's garish eye.Collection: Eye
Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks and rivers wide Towers and battlements it sees Bosom'd high in tufted trees, Where perhaps some beauty lies, The cynosure of neighboring eyes.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Spring
Where shame is, there is also fear.Collection: Shame
But infinite in pardon is my Judge.Collection: Judging
Sable-vested Night, eldest of things.Collection: Night