Milton Quotes - Page 5

• Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

  Terry Eagleton

  Art, Years, Ducks

  "A puritan at play" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2008.

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• I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

  Glen Duncan

  Character, People, Devil

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• I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law, so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought, 'No, I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher; that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne.

  John Mahoney

  Teacher, Brother, Fun

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• The greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and, until quite recent times, scientists... have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid.... I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake, and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Artist, Promise, Drs

  Quoted in Vintage Muggeridge, ed. Geoffrey Barlow (1985)

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• There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

  H. L. Mencken

  Hallucinations, Sound, Tests

  Prejudices, Third Series ch. 3 (1922)

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• Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

  Don Marquis

  Poetry, Saws, Blind

  Quoted in Edward Anthony, O Rare Don Marquis (1962)

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• We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?

  Edward Abbey

  Suicide, Book, Home

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• Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.

  Paul Desmond

  Play, People, Perfect

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• I call this the Fundamental Problem of Political Economy. How do we limit the power that idiots have over us? ... [Milton] Friedmans insight is that a market limits the power that others have over us; conversely, limiting the power that others have over us allows us to have markets. Friedman argued that no matter how wise the officials of government may be, market competition does a better job of protecting us from idiots.

  Arnold Kling

  Wise, Jobs, Government

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• Maria Edgeworth grumbled against vandals who ruined immortal works by quoting the life out of them. "How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets." Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, scissored, patched, and frayed.

  Willis Regier

  Suffering, May, Literature

  Willis Goth Regier (2010). “Quotology”, p.19, U of Nebraska Press

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• I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts-a grace before Milton-a grace before Shakespeare-a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading The Fairie Queene?

  Charles Lamb

  Spiritual, Book, Reading

  Charles Lamb, Thomas Noon Talfourd (1838). “Essays of Elia. Rosamund Gray. Recollections of Chirst's hospital. Essays on the tragedies of Shakspeare [etc.] Letters under assumed signatures published in the Reflector. Curious fragments. Mr. H”, p.108

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• When the economy was going up, [Milton Friedman and I] both gave the same advice, and when the economy was going down, we gave the same advice. But in between he didn't change his advice at all.

  Paul Samuelson

  Advice, Economy

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• Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour.

  William Wordsworth

  Hours, Should

  "London, 1802" l. 1 (1807)

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• [Milton's] argument is (a) St. Augustine was wrong in thinking God's only purpose in giving Adam a female, instead of a male, companion, was copulation. For (b) there is a "peculiar comfort" in the society of man and woman "beside, (i.e. in addition to, apart from) the genial bed"; and (c) we know from Scripture that something analogous to "play" or "slackening the cords" occurs even in God. That is why the Song of Songs describes a thousand raptures...far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment.

  C. S. Lewis

  Song, Men, Thinking

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• There is only one sin and it is: weakness. When I was a boy, I read Milton's Paradise Lost. The only good man I had any respect for was Satan. The only saint is that person who never weakens, faces everything, and determines die game.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Boys, Men, Games

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.434, Manonmani Publishers

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• Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome.

  Camille Paglia

  Overcoming, Males, Female

  "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson". Book by Camille Paglia, 1990.

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• Milton on speed. I am going to need about a decade to think about that. That delay in syntax, the putting off of the click of the sentence into itself, is something that has always intrigued me. I love the emotional effect of it, and never want it to be merely a gesture. Sometimes I try it and it doesn't work, so I have to put the poem aside, and try again, more simply and more strange.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Emotional, Thinking, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.

  William Golding

  Writing, Sound, Hats

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• But the more I read... after awhile... I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene... Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf... the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot... the same dull old scene...

  Ken Kesey

  Writing, Cat, Gone

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• The sightless Milton, with his hair Around his placid temples curled; And Shakespeare at his side,-a freight, If clay could think and mind were weight, For him who bore the world!

  William Wordsworth

  Thinking, Hair, Boredom

  William Wordsworth (1837). “The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth: Together with a Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Now First Published with His Works ...”, p.236

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• It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Talking, Piano

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• The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

  Wendy Lesser

  Self, Voice, Greek

  Wendy Lesser (2014). “Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books”, p.98, Macmillan

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• Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Writing, Past, Century

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1888). “Longfellow's Days: The Longfellow Prose Birthday Book : Extracts from the Journals and Letters of H. W. Longfellow”

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• Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Voice, Bird, Sound

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.233, Delphi Classics

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• If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.

  Anna Brackett

  Plato, Book, Reading

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