To an incompetent judge I must not lie, but I may be silent; to a competent I must answer.
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; and every chapter must be so translated... As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all... No man is an island, entire of itself... 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.
I think it mercy if Thou wilt forget.
I am the dust and the ashes of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and what marble is so precious? But I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul.
Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.
Any man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved with mankind.
First, I give my gracious God an entire sacrifice of body and soul, with my most humble thanks for that assurance which His Blessed Spirit imprints in me now of the Salvation of the one, and the Resurrection of the other;.
O miserable condition of man, which is not imprinted by God, who, as he is immortal himself, had put a coal, a beam of immortality into us, which we might have blown into a flame, but blew it by our first sin; we beggared ourselves by hearkening after falses riches, and infatuated ourselves by hearkening after false knowledge.
Hee that hath all can have no more.
The force of originality “that made Donne so potent an influence in the seventeenth century makes him now at once for us, without his being the less felt as of his period, contemporary – obviously a living poet in the most important sense.” In “The Good-Morrow” Leavis said that.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we.
I joy, that in these straits I see my west;.
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.
Dull sublunary lovers love.
That our affections kill us not, nor dye.
You are earth; he whom you tread upon is no less, and he that treads upon you is no more.
Every woman is a science; for he that plods upon a woman all his life long, shall at length finde himself short of the knowledge of her.
As Sicknesse is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes is solitude; when the infectiousness of the disease deterss them who should assist from coming; even the Phisician dares scarse come... it is an Outlawry, and excommunication upon the patient...
No man is an island entirely of itself. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
No man ever saw God and lived; and yet, I shall not live till I see God; and when I have seen him I shall never die.
As yet God suspends me between heaven and earth, as a meteor; and I am not in heaven because an earthly body clogs me, and I am not in the earth because a heavenly soul sustains me.