John Donne (/dʌn/ DUN; 22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet and cleric in the Church of England.
I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.
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.
Pleasure is none, if not diversified.
True and false fears let us refrain, Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write threescore ; this is the second of our reign.
The distance from nothing to a little, is ten thousand times more, than from it to the highest degree in this life.
Without outward declarations, who can conclude an inward love?
Can there be worse sickness, than to know that we are never well, nor can be so?
That thou remember them, some claim as debt; I think it mercy, if thou wilt forget.
Nature hath no goal though she hath law.
All other things to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay.
Nothing but man of all envenomed things, doth work upon itself, with inborn stings.
God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath.
The sun must not set upon anger, much less will I let the sun set upon the anger of God towards me.
I will not look upon the quickening sun, But straight her beauty to my sense shall run; The air shall note her soft, the fire most pure; Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure; Time shall not lose our passages.
I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, Who died before the god of love was born.
If poisonous minerals, and if that tree, Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us, If lecherous goats, if serpents envious Cannot be damned; alas; why should I be?
Poor heretics there be,Which think to establish dangerous constancy,But I have told them, ‘Since you will be true,You shall be true to them, who are false to you.
God is so omnipresent. . . . God is an angel in an angel, and a stone in a stone, and a straw in a straw.
Kind pity chokes my spleen.
Women are like the arts, forced unto none, Open to all searchers, unprized, if unknown.