John Milton Quotes

As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of good and evil?

He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. 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. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

Abstinence from sins is better than seeking help afterwards.

It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.

Whatever requires an undue amount of thought or trouble or involves a large expenditure of effort and causes our whole life to revolve, as it were, around solicitude for the flesh must be avoided by Christians.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.

The end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue.

Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.

In vain will you fly from one vice if in your wilfulness you embrace another.

Though a man cannot abstain from being weak, he may from being vicious.

It is only in some corner of the brain which we leave empty that Vice can obtain a lodging. When she knocks at your door be able to say: "No room for your ladyship; pass on.

Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.

If a man does not argue with the thoughts that the enemy secretly sows in us, but by prayer to God uproots conversation with them, this is a sign that his mind has attained wisdom, and that he has found a short path.

God is better served in resisting a temptation to evil than in many formal prayers.

Chastity is a virtue with some, but with many it is almost a vice.

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and they that lack the beginning have neither middle nor end

A true Christian man is distinguished from other men, not so much by his beneficent works, as by his patience.

Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo (Give me chastity and continence, but not just yet)!

If we should cease to be generous and charitable because another is sordid and ungrateful, it would be much in the power of vice to extinguish Christian virtues.

The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad.

That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

This fine young man had all the inclination to be a profligate of the first water, and only lacked the one good trait in the common catalogue of debauched vices - open-handedness - to be a notable vagabond. But there his griping and penurious habits stepped in; and as one poison will sometimes neutralise another, when wholesome remedies would not avail, so he was restrained by a bad passion from quaffing his full measure of evil, when virtue might have sought to hold him back in vain.

Every temptation that is resisted, every evil thought that is curbed, every desire that is subdued, every bitter word that is withheld, every noble aspiration that is encouraged, every sublime thought that is cultivated, adds to the development of will-force, good character, and attainment of eternal bliss and immortality.