No Man is an Island

Donne's Meditations were published as a book in 1624 under the title of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. They're in prose, not verse; that's why these quotations are on this page and not in Poems.

The two quotations appear in the same paragraph. The following extract links them together (the italics are Donne's):

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. 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."

© Haydn Thompson 2017–25