John Donne Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
In best understandings, sin began, Angels sinned first, then Devils, and then Man.

John Donne
Men are sponges, which, to pour out, receive;
Who know false play, rather than lose, deceive.
For in best understandings sin began,
Angels sinn'd first, then devils, and then man.
Only perchance beasts sin not ; wretched we
Are beasts in all but white integrity.

John Donne
God affords no man the comfort, the false comfort of Atheism: He will not allow a pretending Atheist the power to flatter himself, so far, as to seriously think there is no God.

John Donne
If then th' Astronomers, whereas they spie A new-found Starre, their Opticks magnifie, How brave are those, who with their Engine, can Bring man to heaven, and heaven againe to man?

John Donne
Between these two, the denying of sins, which we have done, and the bragging of sins, which we have not done, what a space, what a compass is there, for millions of millions of sins!

John Donne
If every gnat that flies were an archangel, all that could but tell me that there is a God; and the poorest worm that creeps tells me that.

John Donne
Love is a growing, or full constant light; And his first minute, after noon, is night.

John Donne