Swami Vivekananda's Quotes On John Milton and Paradise Lost

Swami Vivekananda's Quotes On John Milton and Paradise Lost:

"To be weak is to be miserable", says Milton. 

Doing and suffering are inseparably joined.

—Swami Vivekananda 

• We all know about famous English poet John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) and his epic poem Paradise Lost. In this article we'll collect Swami Vivekananda's quotations on John Milton and Paradise Lost.                                                                                                            
• Fortunately for India, however, she has never produced a Milton, with his 'hurled headlong down the steep abyss'! The whole of that were well exchanged for a couple of lines of Browning!"

• "Gloom existed first." Those of you who have ever been in India or any tropical country, and have seen the bursting of the monsoon, will understand the majesty of these words. I remember three poets' attempts to picture this. Milton says, "No light, but rather darkness visible." Kalidasa says, "Darkness which can be penetrated with a needle," but none comes near this Vedic description, "Gloom hidden in gloom."

• There is only one sin. That is weakness. When I was a boy I read Milton's Paradise Lost. The only good man I had any respect for was Satan. The only saint is that soul that never weakens, faces everything, and determines to die game.

• "To be weak is to be miserable", says Milton. Doing and suffering are inseparably joined.

• We have paintings of sublimity elsewhere in all nations, but almost without exception you will find that their ideal is to grasp the sublime in the muscles. Take for instance, Milton, Dante, Homer, or any of the Western poets. There are wonderfully sublime passages in them; but there it is always a grasping at infinity through the senses, the muscles, getting the ideal of infinite expansion, the infinite of space.

• When Milton or Dante, or any other great European poet, either ancient or modern, wants to paint a picture of the infinite, he tries to soar outside, to make you feel the infinite through the muscles. That attempt has been made here also. You find it in the Samhitas, the infinite of extension most marvellously painted and placed before the readers, such as has been done nowhere else.