Top 246 Quotes & Sayings by John Donne - Page 2

The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha even in Bethlehem, where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at first as his cross at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day. And as even his birth is his death, so every action and passage that manifests Christ to us is his birth, for Epiphany is manifestation.

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

Our critical day is not the very day of our death; but the whole course of our life.

Love is strong as death; but nothing else is as strong as either; and both, love and death, met in Christ. How strong and powerful upon you, then, should that instruction be, that comes to you from both these, the love and death of Jesus Christ!

Friends are ourselves.

I am a little world made cunningly.

I shall die reading; since my book and a grave are so near.

Be more than man, or thou'rt less than an ant.

Thy face is mine eye, and mine is thine.

Who are a little wise the best fools be.

Only our love hath no decay; this, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday, running it never runs from us away, but truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

To rage, to lust, to write to, to commend, All is the purlieu of the god of love.

Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.

A man that is not afraid of a Lion is afraid of a Cat .

Licence my roving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above, below.

Keep us, Lord, so awake in the duties of our calling that we may sleep in thy peace and wake in thy glory.

If I dream I have you, I have you, for all our joys are but fantastical.

Then love is sin, and let me sinful be.

So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, Angels affect us often.

Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right, By these we reach divinity

All mankind is one volume. When one man dies, a chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language. And every chapter must be translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God's hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall live open to one another

No man is an island unto himself.

We love and understand talent; we wish it be within us. The truly gifted, those exceptional few, must wait for the world to catch up.

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.

If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been.

True joy is the earnest which we have of heaven, it is the treasure of the soul, and therefore should be laid in a safe place, and nothing in this world is safe to place it in.

Festive alcohol sometimes leads to an excess of honesty.

God made sun and moon to distinguish the seasons, and day and night; and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons. But God hath made no decrees to distinguish the seasons of His mercies. In Paradise the fruits were ripe the first minute, and in heaven it is always autumn. His mercies are ever in their maturity.

Nature hath no goal though she hath law.

What if this present were the world's last night?

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.

God affords no man the comfort, the false comfort of Atheism: He will not allow a pretending Atheist the power to flatter himself, so far, as to seriously think there is no God.

Women are like the arts, forced unto none, Open to all searchers, unprized, if unknown.

In the first minute that my soul is infused, the Image of God is imprinted in my soul; so forward is God in my behalf, and so early does he visit me.

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.

Let me arrest thy thoughts, wonder with me, Why ploughing, building, ruling and the rest, Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blessed, By cursed Cain's race invented be, And blessed Seth vexed us with astronomy.

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

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.

If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

In heaven it is always autumn.

Doth not a man die even in his birth? The breaking of prison is death, and what is our birth, but a breaking of prison?

Full nakedness! All my joys are due to thee, as souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, to taste whole joys.

Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

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

How great love is, presence best trial makes, But absence tries how long this love will be.

And now good morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room, an everywhere. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown, Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth if th' other do. And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Suth wilt thou be to me, who must Like th' other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I began.

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

All occasions invite His mercies, and all times are His seasons.

For love all love of other sights controls and makes one little room an everywhere

I sing the progress of a deathless soul.

Nothing but man of all envenomed things, doth work upon itself, with inborn stings.

Sleep is pain's easiest salve

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

Sweetest love, I do not go, For weariness of thee, Nor in hope the world can show A fitter love for me; But since that I Must die at last, 'tis best, To use my self in jest Thus by feign'd deaths to die.

Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul!

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.

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.

Now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.