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
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: Positive Attitudes, The Mind, Worry, Optimism, Mind, Hell
Ofttimes nothing profits more than self-esteem, grounded on just and right well manag’d.
—John Milton
Topics: Justice, Self-Discovery
For belief or practice in religion no man ought to be punished or molested by any outward force whatever.
—John Milton
To know that which before us lies in daily life, is the prime wisdom; what is more is fume, or emptiness, or fond impertinence, and renders us, in things that most concern, unpracticed and unprepared.
—John Milton
Topics: Knowledge, Wisdom
To know that which lies before us in daily life is the prime wisdom.
—John Milton
Topics: Life
He who reins within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears is more than a king.
—John Milton
Topics: Control, Self-Control, Discipline
Bacchus, that first from out the purple grape Crushed the sweet poison of misused wine.
—John Milton
Topics: Wine
Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou livest, live well; how long or short permit to heaven.
—John Milton
Topics: Life
None can love freedom heartily but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license.
—John Milton
Topics: Freedom
Let none admire that riches grow in hell; that soil may best deserve the precious bane.
—John Milton
Topics: Wealth
With thee conversing I forget all time.
—John Milton
Topics: Conversation
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
Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war.
—John Milton
Topics: Peace
Confidence imparts a wondrous inspiration to its possessor.—It bears him on in security, either to meet no danger, or to find matter of glorious trial.
—John Milton
Topics: Assurance, Confidence
Satan was the first that practised falsehood under saintly show.
—John Milton
Topics: Hypocrisy
The greatest burden in the world is superstition, not only of ceremonies in the church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home.
—John Milton
Topics: Superstition
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary. The virtue that knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure.
—John Milton
Topics: Virtue
The wife when danger or dishonor lurks, safest and seemliest by her husband stays, who guards her, or with her the worst endures.
—John Milton
Topics: Wife
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
—John Milton
How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabb
—John Milton
Topics: Philosophy
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
—John Milton
Topics: Fame
Swinish gluttony ne’er looks to heaven amid his gorgeous feast, but with besotted, base ingratitude, crams and blasphemes his feeder.
—John Milton
Goodness thinks no ill where no ill seems.
—John Milton
Topics: Goodness
Those graceful acts, those thousand decencies, that daily flow from all her words and actions, mixed with love and sweet compliance, which declare unfeigned union of mind, or in us both one soul.
—John Milton
Topics: Marriage, Wives
To be weak is miserable, doing or suffering.
—John Milton
Topics: Weakness
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. 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.
—John Milton
Topics: Reading, Books
Govern well thy appetite, lest Sin Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death.
—John Milton
Topics: Appetite, Diet
If thou well observe the rule of not too much, by temperance taught, in what thou eatest and drinkest, seeking from thence due nourishment, not gluttonous delight, till many years over thy head return, so mayst thou live, till, like ripe fruit, thou drop into thy mother’s lap, or be with ease gathered, not harshly plucked, in death mature.
—John Milton
When lust, by unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk, but most by lewd and lavish acts of sin, lets in defilement to the inward parts, the soul grows clotted by contagion, embodies and imbrutes till she quite lose the divine property of her first being.
—John Milton
Sweet is the breath of morn; her rising sweet with charm of earliest birds.
—John Milton
Topics: Morning
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