John Donne Quotes

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.

No man is an island, no man stands alone . . . Each man's death diminishes me, because I am involved with mankind . . .

Changed loves are but changed sorts of meat,
And when he hath the kernel eat,
Who doth not fling away the shell?

Nature hath no goal, though she hath law.

No man is an island entirely of itself. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

Contemplative and bookish men must of necessity be more quarrelsome than others, because neither do they contend about matters of fact nor can they determine their controversies by any certain witnesses or judges.

Hee that hath all can have no more

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 worshipped be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorius nothing I did see,
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than a parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too,
And therefore what thou wert, and who
I bid love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

He was the Word, that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, I do believe and take it.

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.

Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthian soul!

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

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.