John Milton

He who hath light within his own clear breast May sit i'th' center, and enjoy bright day: But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the mid-day sun; Himself his own dungeon.

All is not lost, the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield.

Thus with the year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Eev'n or Morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine.

God made man, and out of man, woman.

For neither can we be in health, or have a sound mind, unless we are temperate.

What more oft in nations grown corrupt, And by their vices brought to servitude, Than to love bondage more than liberty?

Lest we should be too much elated with our successes, or too much dejected by our misfortunes.

And the great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tow'r Went to the ground.

For what can be more unjust than to throw the blame of a bad cause upon the fault of the first man?

He who marries a wife, and knows not how to rule her, is like him who takes a wild beast into his house, and knows not how to tame it.

For what more often than not is the cause of all our miseries, but the ill-matching of our desires, and the ill-governing of our affections?

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.

Lords are not to be trusted with the liberty of their own consciences, so little with the liberty of ours.

Let us not stand in a panic fear of every stroke of wind that blows, but if God do stir up them to do us good, we do look that this should be done with all freedom.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal, and proportional), this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a church; not the forced and outward union of cold, and neutral, and inwardly divided minds.

When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his mind through the whole cyclopædia, hath read the choicest authors, ancient and modern, cannot be content with this, but that he must be made a divorce-court man, to be an usher of the court of justice, and to sit in the seat of judgment, to determine upon the matter of divorce, and to be a judge between husband and wife.

God gave him reason, and he gave him choice; and now he blames God for his own choice.

For neither do the spirits damned lose all their virtue, lest bad men should boast their specious deeds on earth.

Th' associates and co-partners of our loss.