John Donne Quotes

231 quotes in 2227 categories

• For love all love of other sights controls and makes one little room an everywhere
• Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
• Despair is the damp of hell, as joy is the serenity of heaven.
• If I lose at play, I blaspheme; if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So, God is always the loser.
• Pleasure is none, if not diversified.
• At most, the greatest persons are but great wens, and excrescences; men of wit and delightful conversation, but as morals for ornament, except they be…
• That which attempts to elevate the ugly to the level of beauty becomes neither; but an obscenity.
• Chastity is not chastity in an old man, but a disability to be unchaste.
• As he that fears God fears nothing else, so he that sees God sees everything else.
• How many times go we to comedies, to masques, to places of great and noble resort, nay even to church only to see the company.
• Nothing but man of all envenomed things, doth work upon itself, with inborn stings.
• Enjoyment always has a spoiling, otherwise it cannot be so.
• 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.
• Festive alcohol sometimes leads to an excess of honesty.
• 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…
• There is in every miracle a silent chiding of the world, and a tacit reprehension of them who require, or who need miracles.
• The difference between the reason of man and the instinct of the beast is this, that the beast does but know, but the man knows…
• As peace is of all goodness, so war is an emblem, a hieroglyphic, of all misery.
• To a large degree, since the beginning of time, charisma or the lack of it has impacted upon those in quest of acclaim. As media…
• Twice or thrice had I loved thee before I knew thy face or name, so in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, angels affect…

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