Quotes & Sayings About 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

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

Good is not good, unless A thousand it possess, But doth waste with greediness. — John Donne

John Donne's 'A Valediction: forbidding mourning' concerns a sea voyage, and uses the image of a circle as an antidote to the abyss of loss and separation. He pictures the invisible but precious bonds which link carer and cared-for, lover and beloved in an attachment relationship as slender threads of gold. — Jeremy Holmes

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

I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one — Raymond Chandler

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. — John Donne

True and false fears let us refrain,
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. — John Donne

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

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man. — Philip K. Dick

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

That's the thing: You don't understand burnout unless you've been burned out. And it's something you can't even explain. It's just doing something you have absolutely no passion for. — Elena Delle Donne

There is no health; physicians say that we, at best, enjoy but neutrality. — John Donne

Thy face is mine eye, and mine is thine. — John Donne

I would like to see you. But: I would only like to see you with your feeling space, and desire, the parents of bravery, and curiosity. I would like you to want to see me without you feeling seduced or pressured. I would like to see you without our playing games: for games are for winners and losers and I do not ever want to win against you, or for you to lose against me, and I do not want to lose against you or for you to win against me. For we are part of the whole, the main, as Donne said - and your gain is mine and my loss is yours. Love is about finding one's match, which means we shall touch our minds and hearts together at once, and never condescend or aim for any goal between us but the truth. — Waylon H. Lewis

A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat,' she repeated, thus enforcing upon herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it's something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one's kind; something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop: that's what it is - a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy - it's ecstasy that matters. — Virginia Woolf

My love though silly is more brave. — John Donne

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

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love — John Donne

Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, The intelligence that moves, devotion is. — John Donne

Who ever comes to shroud me, do not harm Nor question much That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm; The mystery, the sign you must not touch, For 'tis my outward soul, Viceroy to that, which then to heaven being gone, Will leave this to control, And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution. — John Donne

Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own. — Dorothy Bussy

For love all love of other sights controls and makes one little room an everywhere — John Donne

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun, Which was my sin, though it were done before? Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run, And do run still, though still I do deplore? When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done, For I have more. "Wilt Thou forgive that sin, which I have won Others to sin, and made my sin their door? Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun A year or two: - but wallow'd in a score? When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done, For I have more. "I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun My last thread, I shall perish on the shore; But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son Shall shine as He shines now, and heretofore; And having done that, Thou hast done, I fear no more. — John Donne

Who are a little wise the best fools be. — John Donne

Teach me to hear mermaids singing, — John Donne

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

O how feeble is man's power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall!
But come bad chance,
And we join to'it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o'er us to'advance. — John Donne

Commemoration of Pandita Mary Ramabai, Translator of the Scriptures, 1922 A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of tomorrow's dangers, a straw under my knees, a noise in my ear, a light in my eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayers. — John Donne

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

Poor heretics there be,
Which think to establish dangerous constancy,
But I have told them, 'Since you will be true,
You shall be true to them, who are false to you. — John Donne

Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse. — John Donne

He that desires to print a book, should much more desire, to be a book. — John Donne

Death is an ascension to a better library. — John Donne

The force of originality "that made Donne so potent an influence in the seventeenth century makes him now at once for us, without his being the less felt as of his period, contemporary - obviously a living poet in the most important sense." In "The Good-Morrow" Leavis said that — John Donne

At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
— 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 friend's 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 bells tolls; it tolls for thee. — John Donne

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. — John Donne

O miserable condition of man, which is not imprinted by God, who, as he is immortal himself, had put a coal, a beam of immortality into us, which we might have blown into a flame, but blew it by our first sin; we beggared ourselves by hearkening after falses riches, and infatuated ourselves by hearkening after false knowledge. — John Donne

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

To A Young Beauty
Dear fellow-artist, why so free
With every sort of company,
With every Jack and Jill?
Choose your companions from the best;
Who draws a bucket with the rest
Soon topples down the hill.
You may, that mirror for a school,
Be passionate, not bountiful
As common beauties may,
Who were not born to keep in trim
With old Ezekiel's cherubim
But those of Beauvarlet.
I know what wages beauty gives,
How hard a life her servant lives,
Yet praise the winters gone:
There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey's end
With Landor and with Donne. — W.B.Yeats

True joy is the earnest which we have of heaven, it is the treasure of the soul, and therefore should be laid in a safe place, and nothing in this world is safe to place it in. — John Donne

I'd rather be a face for happiness and doing things that you have a passion for, rather than faking it and pretending like I'm this face of women's basketball, when I can't stand the sport at all. — Elena Delle Donne

No man is an island,' said John Donne. I feel we are all islands -- in a common sea. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

But come bad chance
And wee joyne to it our strength
And wee teach it art and length
It selfe o'er us to advance. — John Donne

Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes. — John Donne

The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific. — Peter Levi

How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be — John Donne

We say that the world is made of sea and land, as though they were equal; but we know that there is more sea in the Western than in the Eastern hemisphere. We say that the firmament is full of stars, as though it were equally full; but we know that there are more stars under the Northern than the Southern pole. We say the element of man are misery and happiness, as though he had an equal proportion of both, and the days of man vicissitudinary, as though he had as many good days as ill, and that he lived under a perpetual equinoctial, night and day equal, good and ill fortune in the same measure. But it is far from that; he drinks in misery, and he tastes happiness; he journeys in misery, he does but walk in happiness: and, which is worstn his misery is positive and dogmatical, his happiness is but disputable and problematical: all men call misery misery, but happiness changes the name by the taste of man. — John Donne

Young men mend not their sight by using old men's spectacles. — John Donne

She put a hard-boiled sneer on her face and gave me plenty of time to get used to it — Raymond Chandler

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

I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law, so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought, 'No, I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher; that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne. — John Mahoney

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

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. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. — John Donne

One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sleep with clean hands, either kept clean all day by integrity or washed clean at night by repentance. — John Donne

We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no peace of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnet pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs. — John Donne

A bride, before a "Good-night" could be said,
Should vanish from her clothes into her bed,
As souls from bodies steal, and are not spied.
But now she's laid; what though she be?
Yet there are more delays, for where is he?
He comes and passeth through sphere after sphere;
First her sheets, then her arms, then anywhere.
Let not this day, then, but this night be thine;
Thy day was but the eve to this, O Valentine. — John Donne

That subtle knot which makes us man So must pure lovers souls descend T affections, and to faculties, Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great Prince in prison lies. — John Donne

More than kisses, letters mingle souls. — John Donne

God made sun and moon to distinguish the seasons, and day and night; and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons. But God hath made no decrees to distinguish the seasons of His mercies. In Paradise the fruits were ripe the first minute, and in heaven it is always autumn. His mercies are ever in their maturity. — John Donne

Friends are ourselves. — John Donne

Nothing but man of all envenomed things, doth work upon itself, with inborn stings. — John Donne

This Extasie doth unperplex (We said) and tell us what we love, Wee see by this, it was not sexe, Wee see, we saw not what did move: But as all severall soules contain Mixture of things, they know not what, Love, these mixt souls, doth mixe againe. Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, But yet the body is his booke. — John Donne

Holy Sonnets: Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?"

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.
Only thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can look, I rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one hour I can myself sustain;
Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart. — John Donne

There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once. — John Donne

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. — 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

If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been. — John Donne

How am I supposed to know what you want when you never ask for anything? You just give all the time, you're always there, and when I ask, you give. You give even when I don't ask. Jamie's response to Mark's news — Mari Donne

As I grew up, I became aware that there are people with special needs out there, and I have a real connection with them. — Elena Delle Donne

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

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

I joy, that in these straits I see my west; — John Donne

The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha even in Bethlehem, where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at first as his cross at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day. And as even his birth is his death, so every action and passage that manifests Christ to us is his birth, for Epiphany is manifestation. — John Donne

What gnashing is not a comfort, what gnawing of the worm is not a tickling, what torment is not a marriage bed to this damnation, to be secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God? — John Donne

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

Goe and catche a falling starre, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me, where all past yeares are, Or who cleft the Divel's foot. Teach me to hear Mermaides' singing, Or to keep of envies stinging, And finde What winde Serves to advance an honest minde. — John Donne

Without outward declarations, who can conclude an inward love? — John Donne

No man is an island, entire of itself. — John Donne

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

Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification. — John Donne

My world's both parts, and 'o! Both parts must die. — John Donne

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. — John Donne

Heaven deprives me of a wife who never caused me any other grief than that of her death.
[Fr., Le ciel me prive d'une epouse qui ne m'a jamais donne d'autre chagrin que celui de sa mort.] — Louis XIV

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

Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill;
Destiny may take thy part,
And may thy fears fulfill. — John Donne

I will not look upon the quickening sun, But straight her beauty to my sense shall run; The air shall note her soft, the fire most pure; Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure; Time shall not lose our passages. — John Donne

Keep us, Lord, so awake in the duties of our calling that we may sleep in thy peace and wake in thy glory. — John Donne

Volleyball was a lot of fun, but I knew it wasn't my sport. — Elena Delle Donne

And who understands? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all. — John Donne

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.
[The Autumnal] — John Donne

That our affections kill us not, nor dye. — John Donne

I think it mercy if Thou wilt forget. — John Donne

Nature hath no goal, though she hath law. — John Donne

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. — John Donne

But he who loveliness within Hath found, all outward loathes, For he who color loves, and skin, Loves but their oldest clothes. — John Donne

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. — John Donne