Life & Wisdom Quote by John Milton

Revenge, Milton suggests, is less a weapon than a self-administered infection. The line lands because it flips the usual fantasy of payback: you imagine revenge will close the book, but the real outcome is endless rereading. “Studieth” is the tell. This isn’t a hot-blooded outburst; it’s research, rehearsal, an obsessive curriculum. The revenger becomes a scholar of grievance, and the cost is paid in time, attention, and inner weather.

The metaphor does heavy lifting. Wounds “kept green” are not noble scars; they’re raw, moist, unsealed. Milton’s diction makes revenge sound almost dutiful, like tending a garden, but what’s being cultivated is pain. “Which otherwise would heal and do well” is the quiet twist of the knife: absent that fixation, the body and mind have an ordinary competence for recovery. Revenge interrupts a natural process with deliberate maintenance.

Context matters. Milton lived through civil war, regicide, and restoration, with every side keeping ledgers of injury. He also went blind and wrote in an era when political retribution wasn’t metaphorical; it was policy. The sentence reads like advice to a culture addicted to settling accounts, and to a self tempted by righteous anger. Subtext: the revenger performs strength while actually confessing dependence. Your enemy gets to rent space in your head indefinitely, and you call it justice.

Milton’s intent isn’t to sentimentalize forgiveness; it’s to expose revenge as bad governance of the self. The sharpness comes from its realism: the person you punish most reliably is you.