Explore Quotes by John Donne

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

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

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.

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

In heaven it is always autumn.

Thou art 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. Why swell'st thou then?

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

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

And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.

At the round earth's imagined corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls **** All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance, hath slain.

If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two, Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do.

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.

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.

Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul!

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?

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

The heavens rejoice in motion, why should I Abjure my so much loved variety.

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.

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie Flat on this bed.

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then? But sucked on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?

Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love.