John Donne Quotes (169 Quotes)


    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.

    Batter my heart, three person's God, for, you As yet but knock.


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

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


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

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

    On a round ball A workman that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, Africa and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, All.

    Oh let me, then, his strange love still admire:
    Kings pardon, but he bore our punishment.

    Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

    Reason is our Soules left hand, Faith her right, By these wee reach divinity....

    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.

    Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were

    The Phoenix riddle hath more wit By us, we two being one, are it. So to one neutral thing both sexes fit, We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love.

    All mankind is of one author, and is one volume when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language and every chapter must be so translated God emploies several translators some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice but God's hand is in every translation and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

    Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

    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.

    Great sins are great possessions but levities and vanities possess us too and men had rather part with Christ than with any possession.

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

    To me, to whom God hath revealed his Son, in a Gospel, by a Church, there can be no way of salvation, but by applying that Son of God, by that Gospel, in that Church. Nor is there any other foundation for any, nor other name by which any can be saved, but the name of Jesus. But how this foundation is presented, and how this name of Jesus is notified unto them, amongst whom there is no Gospel preached, no Church established, I am not curious in inquiring. I know that God can be as merciful as those tender Fathers present him to be and I would be as charitable as they are. And therefore, humbly embracing that manifestation of his Son, which he hath afforded me, I leave God, to his unsearchable ways of working upon others, without further inquisition.

    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.


    The household bird, with the red stomacher.

    Such life is like the light which bideth yet
    When the lights life is set,
    Or like the heat, which fire in solid matter
    Leave behinde, two houres after.

    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. Teach me to hear mermaids singing.

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

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

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


    Let me arrest thy thoughts wonder with me, why plowing, building, ruling and the rest, or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest, by cursed Cain's race invented be, and blest Seth vexed us with Astronomy.

    God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath

    The flea, though he kill none, he does all the harm he can.

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

    Since I am coming to that holy room Where, with thy choir 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.

    Contemplative and bookish men must of necessity be more quarrelsome than others, because they contend not about matter of fact, nor can determine their controversies by any certain witnesses, nor judges. But as long as they go towards peace, that is Truth, it is no matter which way.


    Though hope bred faith and love: thus taught, I shall,
    As nations do from Rome, from thy love fall.

    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.

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

    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.

    She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
    Capable of life apart from her.

    Man is not only a contributory creature, but a total creature he does not only make one, but he is all he is not a piece of the world, but the world itself and next to the glory of God, the reason why there is a world.

    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.

    Dull sublunary lovers' love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it.

    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.


    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 feign'd deaths to die.

    So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss, Which sucks two souls, and vapors both away.

    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.


    More John Donne Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Love - God - Death & Dying - Man - Soul - Joy & Excitement - World - War & Peace - Christianity - Reasoning - Life - Angels - Sleep - Body - Faces - Heaven - Nature - Letters - Running - View All John Donne Quotations

    Related Authors


    William Blake - Virgil - John Keats - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - William Somerville - W. H. Auden - Sylvia Plath - Jorge Luis Borges - Hesiod - Amy Lowell


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