John Donne Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

John Donne
I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite.

John Donne
But I do nothing upon my self, and yet I am mine own Executioner.

John Donne
All Kings, and all their favorites,
All glory of honors, beauties, wits
The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass,
Is elder by a year, now, than it was
When thou and I first one another saw:
All other things, to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday,
Running, it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

John Donne
Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls;
For, thus friends absent speak.

John Donne
Oh wrangling schools, that search what fire
Shall burn this world, had none the wit
Unto this knowledge to aspire,
That this her fever might be it?

John Donne
Send home my long strayed eyes to me,
Which (Oh) too long have dwelt on thee.

John Donne
On a huge hill, Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goo.

John Donne
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest, Where can we find two better hemispheres Without sharp North, without declining West?

John Donne
And what is so intricate, so entangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?

John Donne
Whatever dies was not mixed equally, If our two loves be one Or thou and I love so alike That none can slacken, none can die.

John Donne
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke.

John Donne
At most, the greatest persons are but great wens, and excrescences; men of wit and delightful conversation, but as morals for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole.

John Donne
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.

John Donne
If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,
Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damned; alas; why should I be?

John Donne
Yet nothing can to nothing fall, Nor any place be empty quite; Therefore I think my breast hath all Those pieces still, though they be not unite; And now, as broken glasses show A hundred lesser faces, so My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, But after one such love, can love no more.

John Donne
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain.

John Donne
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one double string;
So to entergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

John Donne
To rage, to lust, to write to, to commend,
All is the purlieu of the god of love.

John Donne
It is too little to call man a little world, except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world; than the world doth, nay, than the world is.

John Donne
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.

John Donne
To see God only, I go out of sight:
And to 'scape stormy days, I choose
An everlasting night.

John Donne
Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute.

John Donne
As peace is of all goodness, so war is an emblem, a hieroglyphic, of all misery.

John Donne
As he that fears God fears nothing else, so he that sees God sees everything else.

John Donne
Sweetest love, I do not go,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me;
But since that I
Must die at last, 'tis best,
To use my self in jest
Thus by feigned deaths to die.

John Donne
My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? But thou art also…a figurative, a metaphorical God too.

John Donne
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

John Donne
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

John Donne