John Milton (1608–74) was an English poet of radical politics who lived during one of the most volatile times in the history of England. He is best remembered as the author of Lycidas (1637,) Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained.
Born on Bread Street in London, to an affluent family, Milton studied at Cambridge. He became fluent in Latin, Greek, Italian, and Hebrew, and he committed the entire Bible to memory. In 1638, he left on a 15-month tour to visit Florence, Rome, and Naples and met such important figures as astronomer Galileo Galilei and the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. His expedition to Europe was interrupted by news of political turmoil in England and the likelihood of a civil war.
Upon his return to England, Milton became a polemicist and wrote prose for the Republican cause. He used the then-new printing press to produce and distribute pamphlets. His political influential expanded, and Milton became chief assistant to Oliver Cromwell, lord protector of the English Commonwealth.
In his later years, Milton was beset by failing eyesight. By 1654, Milton was blind. Many of his poems were dictated to assistants, one of whom was the poet Andrew Marvell.
The English Commonwealth collapsed upon Cromwell’s death in 1658. After the reinstatement of the monarchy in 1660, Milton was imprisoned. Marvell argued that Milton was old and blind and thus posed no threat to Charles II. So, Milton narrowly escaped execution and got liberated.
All Milton’s three major works, Paradise Lost (1667; revised, 1674,) Paradise Regained (1671,) and Samson Agonistes (1671) were completed after he had gone blind. Scholars rate Paradise Lost the defining English epic, and interpret it as a political allegory—the fall of man in Eden echoes the lost paradise of Milton’s much-cherished Republic.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Milton
And, re-assembling our afflicted powers, consult how we may henceforth most offend.
—John Milton
Topics: Revenge
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
Topics: Virtue
The spirit of man, which God inspired, cannot together perish with this corporeal clod.
—John Milton
Topics: Immortality
A crown, golden in show, is but a wreath of thorns; brings danger, troubles, cares, and sleepless nights, to him who wears a regal diadem.
—John Milton
Topics: Leadership, Kings, Leaders
Before the sun, before the heavens thou wert, and at the voice of God, as with a mantle didst invest the rising world of waters dark and deep won from the void and formless infinite.
—John Milton
Topics: Light
Zeal and duty are not slow; but on occasion’s firelock watchful wait.
—John Milton
Topics: Zeal
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
—John Milton
Topics: Aging, Age, Youth, Time Management
A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.
—John Milton
Topics: Hell, Positive Attitudes, Mind, Optimism, Worry, The Mind
Where liberty dwells, there is my country.
—John Milton
Topics: Liberty
Where shame is, there is also fear.
—John Milton
Topics: Shame
Nations grown corrupt
Love bondage more than liberty;
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.
—John Milton
Topics: Freedom
Now came still evening on, and twilight gray had in her sober livery all things clad.
—John Milton
Why need a man forestall his date of grief, and run to meet that he would most avoid?
—John Milton
Topics: Anticipation
Sweet is the breath of morn; her rising sweet with charm of earliest birds.
—John Milton
Topics: Morning
A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.
—John Milton
Topics: Belief
Evil into the mind of God or man, may come and go, and yet, if unapproved, still without sin.
—John Milton
The golden sun, in splendor likest heaven, dispenses light from far; days, months, and years, toward his all-cheering lamp turn their swift motions, or are turned by his magnetic beam that warms the universe.
—John Milton
What is the people but a herd confused, a miscellaneous rabble, who extol things vulgar, and well weigh’d, scarce worth the praise? they praise and they admire they know not what, and know not whom, but as one leads the other.
—John Milton
Few sometimes may know, when thousands err.
—John Milton
Topics: Right, Rightness
But peace! I must not quarrel with the will of highest dispensation, which, haply, hath ends above my reach to know.
—John Milton
Even this vein of laughing, as I could produce out of grave authors, hath oftentimes a strong and sinewy force in teaching and comforting.
—John Milton
Topics: Laughter
For contemplation he, and valor formed; for softness she, and sweet attractive grace; he for God only, she for God in him.
—John Milton
If the will, which is the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell for a spiritual being could equal what we should then feel from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness—a horrid thought!
—John Milton
Topics: Will
It is not miserable to be blind; it is miserable to be incapable of enduring blindness.
—John Milton
Topics: Eyes
‘Tis chastity, my brother, chastity. She that has that is clad in complete steel, and like a quivered nymph with arrows keen may trace huge forests and unharbored heaths, infamous hills and sandy perilous wilds, where through the sacred rays of chastity, no savage fierce, bandit, or mountaineer will dare to soil her virgin purity.
—John Milton
To know that which lies before us in daily life is the prime wisdom.
—John Milton
Topics: Life
License they mean, when they cry liberty.
—John Milton
Topics: Liberty
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
—John Milton
Capricious, wanton, bold, and brutal lust is meanly selfish; when resisted, cruel; and, like the blast of pestilential winds, taints the sweet bloom of nature’s fairest forms.
—John Milton
And now, without redemption, all mankind must have been lost, adjudged to death and hell by doom severe.
—John Milton
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