John Donne Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

John Donne
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
I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

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

John Donne
I shall not live 'till I see God; and when I have seen Him, I shall never die.

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

John Donne
Whensoever my affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart, as mine own sword.
On suicide

John Donne
License my roving hands, and let them go,
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned.

John Donne
Though Truth and Falsehood be
Near twins, yet Truth a little elder is.

John Donne
When I died last, and dear, I die
As often as from thee I go.

John Donne
To roam Giddily, and be everywhere but at home, Such freedom doth a banishment become.

John Donne
No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace,
As I have seen in one autumnal face.

John Donne
A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of tomorrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer. So certainly is there nothing, nothing in spiritual things, perfect in this world.

John Donne
The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts
Not of two lovers, but two loves the nests.

John Donne
Our critical day is not the very day of our death; but the whole course of our life.

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
Where, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swelled up, to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best.

John Donne
Change is the nursery Of musicke, joy, life and eternity.

John Donne
Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keeps souls, The grave keeps bodies, verse the fame enrols.

John Donne
Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul!

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

John Donne
But think that we
Are but turned aside to sleep.

John Donne
And then that heaven, which spreads so farre, as that subtill men have, with some appearance of probabilitie, imagined, that in that heaven, in those manifold Sphere of the Planets and the Starres, there are many earths, many worlds, as big as this which we inhabit...

John Donne
I do not love a man, except I hate his vices, because those vices are the enemies, and the destruction of that friend whom I love.

John Donne
When a whirlwind hath blown the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flower, and this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran.

John Donne