John Donne Quotes

Doth not a man die even in his birth? The breaking of prison is death, and what is our birth, but a breaking of prison?

Freedom or jail clips inserted, a baby's being born/ Same time a man is murdered, the beginning and end.

Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.

Inside the walls of a prison my body may be, but my Lord has set my soul free.

What is imprisonment to the man who is fearless of death itself?

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!

You can sail in the desert with a ship of fools. You can smuggle in Moses and his book of rules. But you can't take a mother and give her back her son. What kind of freedom is bought with a gun? People like to build their prison walls when they're afraid to look inside... a thousand points of light are the muzzle flashes in the night. And the freedoms you profess to hold won't bring the dead back from the cold.

Your mother’s heartbeat is the first sound you ever hear and your own heartbeat is the last.

There are worse prisons than words.

He [Martin Luther King Jr.] always used to say you have no choice about being born or dying. The only thing you have a choice about is what you die for.

[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

Suppose you succeed in breaking the wall with your head. And what, then, will you do in the next cell?

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Why do people hanker for the home? - security, safety. But in the name of security and safety, they don't make homes, they make prisons - and they are the jailed and they are the jailers, but because they have the keys in their own hands, they think they are free.

You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dali spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theatre, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!

I think of death as a glad awakening from this troubled sleep which we call life; as an emancipation from a world, which, beautiful though it may be, is still a land of captivity.

Is life a pregnancy? That would make death a birth.

The earth, that is nature's mother, is her tomb.

I didn't just see myself as a film director here [in Life And Nothing More], but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death.

We have only one way to be born and many ways to die.

A beane in liberty is better then a comfit in prison.

We are all prisoners but some of us are in cells with windows and some without.

Better to live or die, once and for all, than die by inches.