John Donne Quotations

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing.

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Since you would save none of me, I bury some of you.

Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.

As virtuous men pass mildly away, and whisper to their souls to go, whilst some of their sad friends do say, the breath goes now, and some say no.

But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am my own executioner.

I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease.

Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love.

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

The day breaks not, it is my heart.

He must pull out his own eyes, and see no creature, before he can say, he sees no God; He must be no man, and quench his reasonable soul, before he can say to himself, there is no God.

Reason is our soul's left hand, faith her right.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

Let us love nobly, and live, and add again years and years unto years.

Let us love nobly, and live, and add again years and years unto years, till we attain to write threescore: this is the second of our reign.

Nurse, O my love is slain, I saw him go / O'er the white Alps alone.

Ride ten thousand days and nights,Till age snow white hairs on thee.

I have done one brave thing - Than all the Worthies did; And yet a braver thence doth spring - Which is to keep that hid

Love is agrowing, to full constant light; and his first minute, after noon, is night.

Licence my roving hands, and let them goBefore, behind, between, above, below.

Since I am coming to that holy room, / Where, with thy quire of Saints for evermore, / I shall be made thy Music; As I come / I tune the instrument here at the door, / And what I must do then, think here before.

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

She is all States, and all Princes, I, / Nothing else is. / Princes do but play us.

So, if I dream I have you, I have you, / For all our joys are but fantastical.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere,/ This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.

Send home my long strayed eyes to me, Which too long have dwelt on thee

If yet I have not all thy love, / Dear, I shall never have it all.

Go, and catch a falling star, / Get with child a mandrake root, / Tell me, where all past years are, / Or who cleft the Devil's foot.

Busy old fool, unruly Sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains call on us? / Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

Batter my heart, three personed God; for you / As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend.

Her pure and eloquent blood / Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, / That one might almost say, her body thought.

Imagine God to be at play with us, but a gamester...

Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally ;If our two loves be one, or thou and I Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

There is a hook in every benefit that sticks in his jaws that takes the benefit, and draws him whither the benefactor will

My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, but after one such love can love no more.

Rebel and Atheist too, why murmur I, / As though I felt the worst that love could do?

Pictures in our eyes to get / Was all our propagation.

Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?

Who ever comes to shroud me, do not harm / Nor question much / That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm.

Whoever loves, if he do not propose the right true end of love, he's one that goes to sea for nothing but to make him sick

When I died last, and, Dear, I die / As often as from thee I go, / Though it be but an hour ago, / And lovers' hours be full eternity.

When I died last, and, Dear, I die as often as from thee I go though it be but an hour ago and lovers hours be full eternity.

Where can we find two better hemispheres/ Without sharp North, without declining West?

When my grave is broke up again / Some second guest to entertain.

To be no part of any body, is to be nothing.

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.

Be your own palace, or the world is your jail.

Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name.

Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be

The world's whole sap is sunk: / The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk.

But O alas, so long, so far / Our bodies why do we forbear? / They're ours, though they're not we, we are / The intelligences, they the sphere.

O, if thou car'st not whom I love alas, thou lov'st not me.

Dear love, for nothing less than thee / Would I have broke this happy dream, / It was a theme / For reason, much too strong for fantasy, / Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet / My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it.

Yet call not this long life; but think that I Am, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die?

Yet call not this long life; but think that IAm, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die?

I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

No man ever saw God and lived. And yet, I shall not live till I see God; and when I have seen him, I shall never die.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a part of a 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 . . .

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

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 myself in jest, / Thus by feigned deaths to die.

The book has been kind of a long time in coming. I've been writing since high school and this is my first book and it's kind of drawn from poems written over an extended period.

I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, / Who died before the god of love was born.

But I do nothing upon myself, and yet am mine own executioner.

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

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee

As he that fears God fears nothing else, so, he that sees God sees everything else

As he that fears God hears nothing else, so, he that sees God sees every thing else.

So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss, / Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away,/ Turn thou ghost that way, and let me turn this, / And let our selves benight our happiest day.

This is my play's last scene, here heavens appoint / My pilgrimage's last mile.

All day, the same our postures were, / And we said nothing all the day.

For as every man is a world in himself, so every man is a church in himself

For good and evil in our actions meet; wicked is not much worse than indiscreet

For I / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

There is nothing which God hath established in a constant cause of nature, and which therefore is done everyday, but would seem a miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once.

Though she were true, when you met her,/ And last, till you write your letter, / Yet she / Will be / False, ere I come, to two, or three.

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove, Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, With silken lines, and silver hooks.

I call not that virginity a virtue, which resideth only in the bodies integrity; much less if it be with a purpose of perpetually keeping it: for then it is a most inhumane vice. - But I call that Virginity a virtue which is willing and desirous to yield itself upon honest and lawful terms, when just reason requireth; and until then, is kept with a modest chastity of body and mind.

I call not that virginity a virtue, which resideth onely in the bodies integrity; much less if it be with a purpose of perpetually keeping it: for then it is a most inhumane vice. - But I call that Virginity a virtue which is willing and desirous to yield it self upon honest and lawfull terms, when just reason requireth; and until then, is kept with a modest chastity of body and mind.

I sing the progress of a deathless soul.

How many times go we to comedies, to masques, to places of great and noble resort, nay even to church only to see the company.

Old grandsires talk of yesterday with sorrow, And for our children we reserve tomorrow.

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

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.

When my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me, when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for they shall be equal but in dust.

Lust-bred diseases rot thee.

The difference between the reason of man and the instinct of the beast is this, that the beast does but know, but the man knows that he knows.

And if there be any addition to knowledge, it is rather a new knowledge than a greater knowledge; rather a singularity in a desire of proposing something that was not knownat all beforethananimproving, anadvancing, a multiplying of former inceptions; and by that means, no knowledge comes to be perfect.

Yesternight the sun went hence, And yet is here today.

How imperfect is all our knowledge!