Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
| NUMBER: | 134 |
| AUTHOR: | John Donne (1572–1631) |
| QUOTATION: | 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 bells tolls; it tolls for thee. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Although the phrase is widely quoted as “for whom the bell tolls” and appears that way in Donne’s Selected Prose, sel. Evelyn Simpson, ed. Helen Gardner and Timothy Healy, p. 101 (1967), most editions give the wording above. |
| SUBJECTS: | Brotherhood |