English Minor Poems; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes; Areopagitica
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Overview
The makers of Encyclopædia Britannica bring you one of the Great Books of the Western World. This text captures major ideas, stories, and discoveries that helped shape Western culture.
Top Highlights
“Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter.” (Page 389)
“We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.” (Page 384)
“For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person more than the restraint of ten vicious.” (Page 395)
“[102] Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.” (Page 137)
“Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.” (Page 391)