Paradise Lost quotes

"who durst defy the omnipotent to arms"

"fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable"

"against the throne and monarchy of God"

"to do aught good never will be our task, but ever to do ill our sole delight"

"all good to me becomes bane" (book 9)

"better to reign in hell than serve in heaven"

"the angry victor in his rage"

"of man's first disobedience"

"justify the ways of God to man"

"adamantine chains and penal fire"

"so spake the apostate angel"

"fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable"

"who durst defy the omnipotent to arms"

"against the throne and monarchy of God"

"to do aught good never will be our task, but ever to do ill our sole delight"

"all good to me becomes bane" (book 9)

"better to reign in hell than serve in heaven"

"the angry victor in his rage"

"of man's first disobedience"

"justify the ways of God to man"

"adamantine chains and penal fire"

"so spake the apostate angel"

"Milton's Satan as a moral being is far superior to his God in that he perseveres to some purpose which he had conceived to be excellent, in spite of adversity or torture" - Shelley

"The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it" Blake

"Ruined splendour, singularity of daring and grandeur of sufferance, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity" Coleridge

Satan is a "personified self-contradiction" - C.S. Lewis

Paradise Lost addresses "the three dominant ideas to Milton: freedom, order, and degree" - Radzinowicz

Milton's verse... "escapes the clownishness of fashionable taste" - Sage

"Satan is obsessed with his own importance" - Carey

"Milton's big similes, or his oxymorons.. reflect the poem's conflict between theory and impact" - Carey

"enacts a parodic version of heroic tragedy" - Leonard