"With thee conversing I forget all time, All seasons, and their change; all please alike. Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun When first on this delightful land he spreads His orient beams on herb, tree, fruit, and flower, Glistring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth After soft showers; and sweet the coming on Of grateful evning mild; then silent night With this her solemn bird and this fair moon, And these the gems of heaven, her starry train: But neither breath of morn when she ascends With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower, Glistring with dew, nor fragrance after showers, Nor grateful evning mild, nor silent night With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon Or glittering starlight, without thee is sweet."
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the English poet John Milton (1608–1674). The poem concerns the biblical story of the fall of man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The first version, published in 1667, consists of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, arranged into twe
"Sing Heavnly Muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed, In the Beginning how the Heavns and Earth Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill Delight thee more, and Siloas Brook that flowd Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th Aonian Mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime."
"What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men."
"Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from th ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th Omnipotent to arms."
"For who can yet believe, though after loss, That all these puissant legions, whose exile Hath emptied Heaven, shall fail to re-ascend, Self-raised, and repossess their native seat?"
"With grave Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed A pillar of state; deep on his front engraven Deliberation sat and public care; And princely counsel in his face yet shone, Majestic though in ruin: sage he stood, With Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look Drew audience and attention still as night Or summers noontide air."
"The infernal serpent; he it was, whose guile, Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived The mother of mankind."
"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"