John Milton Quotes

Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago,“ has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science Can from the ashes in our hearts once more The rose of youth restore? What craft of alchemy can bid defiance To time and change, and for a single hour Renew this phantom-flower?

Time never runs backward when I need it to. Not for me, and not for anyone else.

The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles whom we knew.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?

If only Jupiter would restore me those bygone years.

And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems, It would be easier sometimes to change the past.

One of the reasons why old people make so many journeys into the past is to satisfy themselves that it is still there.

Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

O, call back yesterday, bid time return

Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.

The problem with time, I've learned, whether it's those first two weeks I got to spend with you, or the final two months I got to spend with him, eventually time always runs out. I have no idea where you are out there in the world, John. But I understand that I lost the right to know these things long ago. No matter how many years go by, I know one thing to be as true as ever was - I'll see you soon then.

The only possible paradises are those we have lost

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

Happiness has not to all the same name: to Youth she is known as the Future; Age knows her as the Dream.

Those ancients who in poetry presented the golden age, who sang its happy state, perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here, mankind's root was innocent; and here were every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

When I was Younger, I wanted to be something.Now, I just want to be younger.