John Donne Quotes

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved?
The Good Morrow

But this, all pleasures fancies be;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got,
'twas but a dream of thee.
The Good Morrow

I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry.
The Triple Fool

Who are a little wise the best fools be.
The Triple Fool

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
The Sun Rising

She's all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is.
The Sun Rising

For God's sake, hold your tongue and let me love!
The Canonization

We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms.
The Canonization

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
Elegy II: The Anagram

She and comparisons are odious.
Elegy VIII: The Comparison.

O my America! my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned.
Elegy XX: To His Mistress Going to Bed

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.
Holy Sonnet X

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Holy Sonnet X

Reason is our soul's left hand, faith her right;
By these we reach divinity.
Letters: To the Countess of Bedford

No man is an Island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the Continent,
a part of the main.
Meditation XVII

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.
Meditation XVII

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.
Meditation XVII

to John Donne