Top 100 Donne's Quotes
#1. Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.
King James I
#2. Tessa reached for the words ... You know, in that essay of Donne's, what he says ... about how no man is an island. Everything you do touches others.
Cassandra Clare
#3. My world's both parts, and 'o! Both parts must die.
John Donne
#4. By nature, which gave it, this liberty Thou lov'st, but Oh! canst thou love it and me? Likeness glues love: Then if so thou do, To make us like and love, must I change too?
John Donne
#6. Each man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, ask not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. - John Donne
Meg Cabot
#7. Other men's crosses are not my crosses.
John Donne
#8. 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
#9. Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar's heritage
Yvor Winters
#10. For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love
John Donne
#11. 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
#12. The flea, though he kill none, he does all the harm he can.
John Donne
#13. For this, Love is enraged with me;
Yet kills not. If I must example be
To future rebels, if the unborn
Must learn by my being cut up and torn,
Kill and dissect me, Love; for this
Torture against thine own end is:
Racked carcasses make ill anatomies
John Donne
#14. And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.
Ted Hughes
#15. That thou remember them, some claim as debt; I think it mercy, if thou wilt forget.
John Donne
#16. If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
John Donne
#17. 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
#18. Yesternight the sun went hence, And yet is here today.
John Donne
#19. Hee that hath all can have no more
John Donne
#20. Good is not good, unless A thousand it possess, But doth waste with greediness.
John Donne
#21. I wouldn't say she looked exactly wistful, but neither did she look as hard to get as a controlling interest in General Motors
Raymond Chandler
#22. To know and feel all this and not have the words to express it makes a human a grave of his own thoughts.
John Donne
#23. There is hook in every benefit, that sticks in his jaws that takes that benefit, and draws him whither the benefactor will.
John Donne
#24. I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.
John Donne
#25. To an incompetent judge I must not lie, but I may be silent; to a competent I must answer.
John Donne
#26. I count all that part of my life lost which I spent not in communion with God, or in doing good.
John Donne
#27. Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love.
John Donne
#28. 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
#29. When God's hand is bent to strike, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God ; but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination.
John Donne
#30. I thought I needed to go to one of the top five schools in the nation and never even thought 'What's important to me?' Instead of figuring out what was important, which was obviously being near home, I kind of just went with what everyone thought I should do.
Elena Delle Donne
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right,
By these we reach divinity
John Donne
#34. I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, Who died before the god of love was born.
John Donne
#35. God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath.
John Donne
#36. What Shelley's world of Prometheus Unbound really has to fear is not resurrection of Jupiter but the resurrection of John Donne.
Cleanth Brooks
#37. 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
#38. And Jacob came clothed in vile harsh attire, But to supplant, and with gainful intent; God clothed Himself in vile man's flesh, that so He might be weak enough to suffer woe.
John Donne
#39. All problems have to be solved eventually by ONESELF, and that's where all your lovely John Donne stuff turns out to be a load of crap because, in the last analysis, A MAN IS AN ISLAND
Kenneth Williams
#40. Young men mend not their sight by using old men's spectacles.
John Donne
#41. Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail. ~John Donne
Kristen Pierce
#42. Any man's death diminishes me, for I am involved with mankind.
John Donne
#43. I was not really aware of the dystopian genre before I read 'The Handmaid's Tale.' Many poets as well, like John Donne and Emily Dickinson, would be the influences; I specialized in Emily Dickinson at university. Both of those poets have really interesting ways of looking at life and death.
Samantha Shannon
#44. 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
#45. Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, The intelligence that moves, devotion is.
John Donne
#46. 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
#47. Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.
John Donne
#48. This is joy's bonfire, then, where love's strong arts
Make of so noble individual parts
One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts.
John Donne
#49. It's expensive to raise a child with special needs, which people don't even think about. Emotionally it can be a struggle, but financially it's really rough.
Elena Delle Donne
#50. When I was young, I was obsessed with Michael Jordan and the Bulls. He's the only person I get starstruck over. I don't know what I'd do if I met him - I'd be in shock! That's my dream.
Elena Delle Donne
#51. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.
T. S. Eliot
#52. I fix mine eye on thine, and there
Pity my picture burning in thine eye ...
John Donne
#53. 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.
John Donne
#54. Who knows his virtues name or place, hath none.
John Donne
#55. Dull sublunary lovers' love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it.
John Donne
#56. Tis true, 'tis day; what though it be? O wilt thou therefore rise from me? Why should we rise, because 'tis light? Did we lie down, because 'twas night? Love which in spite of darkness brought us hither Should in despite of light keep us together.
John Donne
#57. Changed loves are but changed sorts of meat,
And when he hath the kernel eat,
Who doth not fling away the shell?
John Donne
#58. I have done one braver thing than all the Worthies did, and yet a braver thence doth spring, which is, to keep that hid.
John Donne
#59. Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
John Donne
#60. So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss, Which sucks two souls, and vapors both away.
John Donne
#61. Send me nor this, nor that, to increase my store,
But swear thou think'st I love thee, and no more.
John Donne
#62. Whilst my physicians by their love are grown Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie Flat on this bed.
John Donne
#63. If every gnat that flies were an archangel, all that could but tell me that there is a God; and the poorest worm that creeps tells me that.
John Donne
#64. A man, engaged in his simple reflections in everyday life, will comprehend neither the possibility, nor the benefits of self-sacrifice, but, when given ("qu'on lui donne", Fr.) a great cause to defend, and he will find only natural to sacrifice oneself for it.
African Spir
#65. It is too little to call man a little world; Except God, man is a diminutive to nothing.
John Donne
#66. No man is an island. If you want to blame anybody for poisoning the world with that socialistic idea, blame John Donne.
Timothy Noah
#67. 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 worshiped be.
John Donne
#68. Since you would save none of me, I bury some of you.
John Donne
#69. 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.
John Donne
#70. I was clever enough to know that John Donne was offering something that was awfully enjoyable. I just wasn't clever enough to actually enjoy it.
Wallace Shawn
#72. And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.
Donna Tartt
#74. Old grandsires talk of yesterday with sorrow, And for our children we reserve tomorrow.
John Donne
#75. Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification.
John Donne
#76. 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
#77. 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.
John Donne
#78. Men perish with whispering sins-nay, with silent sins, sins that never tell the conscience that they are sins, as often with crying sins; and in hell there shall meet as many men that never thought what was sin, as that spent all their thoughts in the compassing of sin.
John Donne
#79. 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
#80. Chastity is not chastity in an old man, but a disability to be unchaste.
John Donne
#81. Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.
John Donne
#82. But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am my own executioner.
John Donne
#83. But think that we Are but turned aside to sleep.
John Donne
#84. That our affections kill us not, nor dye.
John Donne
#85. 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
#86. The distance from nothing to a little, is ten thousand times more, than from it to the highest degree in this life.
John Donne
#87. 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
#88. All other things to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay ...
John Donne
#89. The rich have no more of the kingdom of heaven than they have purchased of the poor by their alms.
John Donne
#90. When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.
John Donne
#91. You don't have to follow what most players do by going to the top school. You can do anything at any school you're at, as long as you're focused and you work hard.
Elena Delle Donne
#92. Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant;
the only harmless great thing.
John Donne
#93. Between cowardice and despair, valour is gendred.
John Donne
#94. Sleep is pain's easiest salve, and doth fulfill all the offices of death, except to kill
John Donne
#95. There is in every miracle a silent chiding of the world, and a tacit reprehension of them who require, or who need miracles.
John Donne
#96. And what is so intricate, so entangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?
John Donne
#97. For love all love of other sights controls and makes one little room an everywhere
John Donne
#98. Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill;
Destiny may take thy part,
And may thy fears fulfill.
John Donne
#99. She put a hard-boiled sneer on her face and gave me plenty of time to get used to it
Raymond Chandler
#100. Though truth and falsehood be Near twins, yet truth a little elder is.
John Donne
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