The mind is its own place, and in itself can…

The lines come early in Paradise Lost. Satan and his rebel angels, hurled from Heaven, lie on a lake of fire; Satan rises, flies to the burning shore, and surveys his new domain: “Is this the region, this the soil, the clime… That we must change for Heaven?” Rather than lament, he defies: “Farewell happy fields… hail, horrors!” He greets Hell as its “new possessor”, one who brings “A mind not to be changed by place or time”. The line follows, and soon after, the famous boast: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

Milton, blind for more than a decade, dictated the poem and published it in 1667. Satan’s claim is superb, and false. In Book IV, as he approaches Eden, he admits the truth: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.” The mind that was to turn Hell into Heaven carries Hell within it.

Today the line is often quoted without irony, as a lesson in the power of the mind over circumstances.

Paradise Lost, Book I (Satan), 1667

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work