John Donne Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by John Donne with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“No man is an island, entire of itself.”
Meaning & context
Donne argues against imagining people as self-contained units; individual life is bound up with the lives of others.
Source details
Meditation XVII.
Source identified2
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“Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Meaning & context
Another person’s loss is not completely separate from us because human lives participate in a shared condition.
Source details
Meditation XVII; modernized capitalization.
Source identified3
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“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;”
Meaning & context
Donne personifies Death only to deny its final authority, building a Christian devotional argument that mortality does not have the last word.
Source details
Holy Sonnet 10, posthumously printed in 1633 and represented by Wikisource. The poem’s defiance of death rests on explicitly Christian claims about resurrection and eternal life; it is devotional poetry, not factual evidence about death.
