Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?
—John Donne
Topics: Love, Lovers
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.
—John Donne
Topics: Fighting, Quarrels, Fight
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.
—John Donne
Topics: Dying, Death
Chastity is not chastity in an old man, but a disability to be unchaste.
—John Donne
Topics: Disability
Never start with tomorrow to reach eternity. Eternity is not being reached by small steps.
—John Donne
I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease.
—John Donne
Topics: Medicine, Doctors
For good and evil in our actions meet; wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.
—John Donne
Topics: Evil
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.
—John Donne
Topics: Spring, Seasons, Autumn
Nature’s great masterpiece, an elephant;
the only harmless great thing.
—John Donne
Topics: Greatness & Great Things
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.
—John Donne
Topics: Family
Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.
—John Donne
Topics: Self-reliance
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
—John Donne
Topics: Love, Beauty
Pleasure is none, if not diversified.
—John Donne
Topics: Pleasure
God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.
—John Donne
I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.
—John Donne
Topics: Death, Exercise, Dying
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
Topics: Sin
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
Topics: Atheism
Who are a little wise the best fools be.
—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
Topics: Wonder, Miracles
As he that fears God hears nothing else, so, he that sees God sees every thing else.
—John Donne
Topics: Faith
Whenever any affliction assails me, I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword. Often meditation of this hath wonne me to a charitable interpretation of their action, who dy so: and provoked me a little to watch and exagitate their reasons, which pronounce so peremptory judgments upon them.
—John Donne
Topics: Suicide
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
Topics: Science, Scientists
But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am my own executioner.
—John Donne
Topics: Mistakes
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
—John Donne
Topics: 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…As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness….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 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 bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
—John Donne
Topics: Death, Humanity, Cooperation, Friend, Teamwork, Help, Dying, Kind
Between cowardice and despair, valour is gendered.
—John Donne
Topics: Cowardice, Courage
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
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness
We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.
—John Donne
Topics: Prison
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
Topics: Prayer
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.
—John Donne
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- John Keats English Poet
- Enoch Powell British Politician
- George Herbert Welsh Anglican Poet
- John Webster English Dramatist
- George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) English Novelist
- John Milton English Poet
- Edmund Spenser English Poet
- Christina Rossetti English Poet
- William Shakespeare British Playwright
- Charles Lamb British Essayist, Poet
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