The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (309 page)
Read The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Online
Authors: Elizabeth Knowles
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 2, l. 300
To sit in darkness here
Hatching vain empires.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 2, l. 377
Long is the way
And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 2, l. 432
For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 2, l. 556
Black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 2, l. 670
Chaos umpire sits,
And by decision more embroils the fray.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 2, l. 907
Sable-vested Night, eldest of things.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 2, l. 962
With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout,
Confusion worse confounded.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 2, l. 995
Die he or justice must.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 3, l. 210
Dark with excessive bright.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 3, l. 380
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 3, l. 683
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 73
Evil, be thou my good.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 110
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 256
Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers
Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 268
He for God only, she for God in him.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 299
Adam, the goodliest man of men since born
His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 323
These two
Emparadised in one another's arms
The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill
Of bliss on bliss.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 505
With thee conversing I forget all time.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 639
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 677
Sleep on
Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 773
Him there they found
Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 799
But wherefore thou alone? Wherefore with thee
Came not all hell broke loose?
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 4, l. 917
My fairest, my espoused, my latest found,
Heaven's last best gift, my ever new delight.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 5, l. 18
Best image of myself and dearer half.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 5, l. 95
What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 5, l. 574
Hear all ye angels, progeny of light,
Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 5, l. 600.
There Leviathan
Hugest of living creatures, on the deep
Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 7, l. 412
Oft-times nothing profits more
Than self esteem, grounded on just and right
Well managed.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 8, l. 571.
The serpent subtlest beast of all the field.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 9, l. 86
As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 9, l. 445.
She fair, divinely fair, fit love for gods.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 9, l. 489
God so commanded, and left that command
Sole daughter of his voice; the rest, we live
Law to our selves, our reason is our law.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 9, l. 652
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe
That all was lost.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 9, l. 782
O fairest of creation, last and best
Of all God's works.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 9, l. 896
Flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 9, l. 914.
…Yet I shall temper so
Justice with mercy.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 10, l. 77
This novelty on earth, this fair defect
Of nature?
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 10, l. 891
Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy
And moon-struck madness.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 11, l. 485
The evening star,
Love's harbinger.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 11, l. 588
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Paradise Lost
(1667) bk. 12, l. 646
But on occasion's forelock watchful wait.
Paradise Regained
(1671) bk. 3, l. 173
He who seeking asses found a kingdom.
of Saul
Paradise Regained
(1671) bk. 3, l. 242.
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence…
See there the olive grove of Academe,
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.
Paradise Regained
(1671) bk. 4, l. 240
The first and wisest of them all professed
To know this only, that he nothing knew.
Paradise Regained
(1671) bk. 4, l. 293.
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself.
Paradise Regained
(1671) bk. 4, l. 327
But headlong joy is ever on the wing.
"The Passion" (1645) st. 1
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.
Samson Agonistes
(1671) l. 40
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
Samson Agonistes
(1671) l. 80
The sun to me is dark
And silent as the moon,
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Samson Agonistes
(1671) l. 86
To live a life half dead, a living death.
Samson Agonistes
(1671) l. 100
Just are the ways of God,
And justifiable to men;
Unless there be who think not God at all.
Samson Agonistes
(1671) l. 293
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail.
Samson Agonistes
(1671) l. 1721
And calm of mind, all passion spent.
Samson Agonistes
(1671) l. 1758
Time the subtle thief of youth.
Sonnet
7 "How soon hath time" (1645)
Licence they mean when they cry liberty;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.
Sonnet
12 "I did but prompt the age" (1673)
When I consider how my light is spent,
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless.
Sonnet
16 "When I consider how my light is spent" (1673)
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Sonnet
16 "When I consider how my light is spent" (1673)
Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.
Sonnet
19 "Methought I saw my late espousèd saint" (1673)
Cromwell, our chief of men.
"To the Lord General Cromwell" (written 1652)
Peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war.
"To the Lord General Cromwell" (written 1652)
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
Areopagitica
(1644)
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…that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.
Areopagitica
(1644)
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.
Areopagitica
(1644)
If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man.
Areopagitica
(1644)
What does he [God] then but reveal Himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?
Areopagitica
(1644)
A city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty.
of London
Areopagitica
(1644)
Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
Areopagitica
(1644) p. 31
Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
(1643) "To the Parliament of England"
What I have spoken, is the language of that which is not called amiss
