Quotes About John Donne

Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable.

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

Society is itself an education in the extrovert values, and rarely has there been a society that has preached them so hard. No man is an island, but how John Donne would writhe to hear how often, and for what reasons, the thought is so tiresomely repeated.

Of all the commentaries on the Scriptures, good examples are the best.

But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine. As John Donne has written, it is not so pure and abstract as one might once have thought and wished, but it does endure, and it does grow

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

Dull sublunary lovers' love(Whose soul is sense) cannot admitAbsence, because it doth removeThose things which elemented it.

Our soules, (which to advance their state, Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee.... When love, with one another so Interinanimates two soules.... Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, But yet the body is his booke....

Let not thy divining heart Forethink me any ill; Destiny may take thy part, And may thy fears fulfill.

At one blood labors to beget, Spirits as like as it can, Because such figures need to knit, that subtle knot which makes us man.

All measure, and all language, I should pass, Should I tell what a miracle she was.

Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.

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

Sleep is pain's easiest salve, and doth fulfil All offices of death, except to kill.

Let not thy divining heart Forethink me any ill; Destiny may take thy part, And may thy fears fulfill.

Distant American colonies were presented as a cure. The poor could be purged. In 1622, the famous poet and clergyman John Donne wrote of Virginia in this fashion, describing the new colony as the nation's spleen and liver, draining the "ill humours of the body . . . to breed good bloud.