GLOUCESTER: My lord, 'tis but a base ignoble mind
That mounts no higher than a bird can soar.

KING HENRY VI: How irksome is this music to my heart!
When such strings jar, what hope of harmony?

GLOUCESTER: Thus sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud;
And after summer evermore succeeds
Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold:
So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet.

QUEEN MARGARET: Small curs are not regarded when they grin;
But great men tremble when the lion roars.

YORK: Show me one scar character'd on thy skin:
Men's flesh preserved so whole do seldom win.

WARWICK: Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh
And sees fast by a butcher with an axe,
But will suspect 'twas he that made the slaughter?

SUFFOLK: Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan,
I would invent as bitter-searching terms,
As curst, as harsh and horrible to hear,
Deliver'd strongly through my fixed teeth,
With full as many signs of deadly hate,
As lean-faced Envy in her loathsome cave.

SUFFOLK: I can no more: live thou to joy thy life;
Myself no joy in nought but that thou livest.

CADE: Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny: the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops and I will make it felony to drink small beer.

DICK: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

CADE: Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.

SMITH: The clerk of Chatham: he can write and read and cast accompt.

CADE: O monstrous!

BUCKINGHAM: Trust nobody, for fear you be betray'd.

CADE: Be it known unto thee by these presence, even the presence of Lord Mortimer, that I am the besom that must sweep the court clean of such filth as thou art. Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and, contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.

CADE: Was ever feather so lightly blown to and fro as this multitude?

RICHARD: Sword, hold thy temper; heart, be wrathful still:
Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill.

YORK: In them I trust; for they are soldiers,
Witty, courteous, liberal, full of spirit.

RUTLAND: So looks the pent-up lion o'er the wretch
That trembles under his devouring paws;
And so he walks, insulting o'er his prey,
And so he comes, to rend his limbs asunder.

YORK: O tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide!

EDWARD: Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three suns?

RICHARD: Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;
Not separated with the racking clouds,
But sever'd in a pale clear-shining sky.
See, see! they join, embrace, and seem to kiss,
As if they vow'd some league inviolable:
Now are they but one lamp, one light, one sun.
In this the heaven figures some event.

RICHARD: To weep is to make less the depth of grief:
Tears then for babes; blows and revenge for me.

CLIFFORD: The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on.

KING HENRY VI: O God! methinks it were a happy life,
To be no better than a homely swain;
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run,
How many make the hour full complete;
How many hours bring about the day;
How many days will finish up the year;
How many years a mortal man may live.

KING HENRY VI: When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock;
So many hours must I take my rest;
So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will ean:
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece:
So minutes, hours, days, months, and years,
Pass'd over to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.

SON: Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.

KING HENRY VI: O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!
Whiles lions war and battle for their dens,
Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity.

KING HENRY VI: My crown is in my heart, not on my head;
Not decked with diamonds and Indian stones,
Nor to be seen: my crown is called content:
A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy.

KING HENRY VI: Look, as I blow this feather from my face,
And as the air blows it to me again,
Obeying with my wind when I do blow,
And yielding to another when it blows,
Commanded always by the greater gust;
Such is the lightness of you common men.

GLOUCESTER: Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.

GLOUCESTER: I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down.

KING EDWARD IV: Though fortune's malice overthrow my state,
My mind exceeds the compass of her wheel.

KING EDWARD IV: What fates impose, that men must needs abide;
It boots not to resist both wind and tide.

KING HENRY VI: Ay, such a pleasure as incaged birds
Conceive when after many moody thoughts
At last by notes of household harmony
They quite forget their loss of liberty.

WARWICK: Thus yields the cedar to the axe's edge,
Whose arms gave shelter to the princely eagle,
Under whose shade the ramping lion slept,
Whose top-branch overpeer'd Jove's spreading tree
And kept low shrubs from winter's powerful wind.

GLOUCESTER: Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind;
The thief doth fear each bush an officer.

GLOUCESTER: I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word 'love,' which graybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone.

GLOUCESTER: What should I say? His deeds exceed all speech:
He ne'er lift up his hand but conquered.

EXETER: We mourn in black: why mourn we not in blood?

EXETER: Upon a wooden coffin we attend,
And death's dishonourable victory
We with our stately presence glorify,
Like captives bound to a triumphant car.

JOAN LA PUCELLE: Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.

PLANTAGENET: I'll note you in my book of memory,
To scourge you for this apprehension.

FIRST SERVING-MAN: I'll to the surgeon's.

SECOND SERVING-MAN: And so will I.

THIRD SERVING-MAN: And I will see what physic the tavern affords.

EXETER: This late dissension grown betwixt the peers
Burns under feigned ashes of forged love
And will at last break out into a flame:
As fester'd members rot but by degree,
Till bones and flesh and sinews fall away,
So will this base and envious discord breed.

JOAN LA PUCELLE: You judge it straight a thing impossible
To compass wonders but by help of devils.

SUFFOLK: For what is wedlock forced but a hell,
An age of discord and continual strife?
Whereas the contrary bringeth bliss,
And is a pattern of celestial peace.

KING HENRY VI: I feel such sharp dissension in my breast,
Such fierce alarums both of hope and fear,
As I am sick with working of my thoughts.

VALENTINE: She shall be dignified with this high honour--
To bear my lady's train, lest the base earth
Should from her vesture chance to steal a kiss
And, of so great a favour growing proud,
Disdain to root the summer-swelling flower
And make rough winter everlastingly.

PROTEUS: O heaven! were man
But constant, he were perfect. That one error
Fills him with faults; makes him run through all the sins:
Inconstancy falls off ere it begins.

GLOUCESTER: Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.

GLOUCESTER: Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

GLOUCESTER: Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.

GLOUCESTER: And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain.

GLOUCESTER: Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams.

GLOUCESTER: Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so,
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven,
If heaven will take the present at our hands.

GLOUCESTER: And, if I fall not in my deep intent,
Clarence hath not another day to live:
Which done, God take King Edward to his mercy,
And leave the world for me to bustle in!

LADY ANNE: O wonderful, when devils tell the truth!

GLOUCESTER: But shall I live in hope?

LADY ANNE: All men, I hope, live so.

GLOUCESTER: Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I'll have her; but I will not keep her long.

GLOUCESTER: I'll be at charges for a looking-glass,
And entertain some score or two of tailors,
To study fashions to adorn my body:
Since I am crept in favour with myself,
Will maintain it with some little cost.

GLOUCESTER: Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.

QUEEN MARGARET: They that stand high have many blasts to shake them;
And if they fall, they dash themselves to pieces.

QUEEN MARGARET: Live each of you the subjects to his hate,
And he to yours, and all of you to God's!

CLARENCE: Lord, Lord! methought, what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatter'd in the bottom of the sea:
Some lay in dead men's skulls; and, in those holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,
As 'twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
Which woo'd the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mock'd the dead bones that lay scatter'd by.

BRAKENBURY: I will not reason what is meant hereby,
Because I will be guiltless of the meaning.

SECOND MURDERER: 'Faith, some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me.

FIRST MURDERER: Remember our reward, when the deed is done.

SECOND MURDERER: 'Zounds, he dies: I had forgot the reward.

FIRST MURDERER: Where is thy conscience now?

SECOND MURDERER: In the Duke of Gloucester's purse.

GLOUCESTER: But he, poor soul, by your first order died,
And that a winged Mercury did bear:
Some tardy cripple bore the countermand,
That came too lag to see him buried.

SECOND CITIZEN: I fear, I fear 'twill prove a giddy world.

THIRD CITIZEN: When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks;
When great leaves fall, then winter is at hand;
When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?
Untimely storms make men expect a dearth.
All may be well; but if God sort it so,
'Tis more than we deserve or I expect.

QUEEN ELIZABETH: I see, as in a map, the end of all.

PRINCE EDWARD: But say, my lord, it were not register'd,
Methinks the truth should live from age to age,
As 'twere retail'd to all posterity,
Even to the general all-ending day.

GLOUCESTER: So wise so young, they say, do never live long.

CATESBY: 'Tis a vile thing to die, my gracious lord,
When men are unprepared and look not for it.

GLOUCESTER: If? Thou protector of this damned strumpet,
Talk'st thou to me of 'ifs'? Thou art a traitor:
Off with his head!

HASTINGS: O momentary grace of mortal men,
Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!
Who builds his hopes in air of your good looks,
Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast,
Ready, with every nod, to tumble down
Into the fatal bowels of the deep.

BUCKINGHAM: Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian;
Speak and look back, and pry on every side,
Tremble and start at wagging of a straw,
Intending deep suspicion: ghastly looks
Are at my service, like enforced smiles;
And both are ready in their offices,
At any time, to grace my stratagems.

GLOUCESTER: And to that end we wished your lord-ship here,
T' avoid the censures of the carping world.

QUEEN ELIZABETH: Stay, yet look back with me unto the Tower.
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes
Whom envy hath immured within your walls!
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones!
Rude ragged nurse, old sullen playfellow
For tender princes, use my babies well!
So foolish sorrow bids your stones farewell.

KING RICHARD III: Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead;
And I would have it suddenly perform'd.

KING RICHARD III: Uncertain way of gain! But I am in
So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.

QUEEN MARGARET: So, now prosperity begins to mellow
And drop into the rotten mouth of death.

QUEEN ELIZABETH: O thou well skill'd in curses, stay awhile,
And teach me how to curse mine enemies!

QUEEN MARGARET: Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were fairer than they were,
And he that slew them fouler than he is:
Bettering thy loss makes the bad causer worse:
Revolving this will teach thee how to curse.

KING RICHARD III: Harp not on that string, madam; that is past.

KING RICHARD III: Go, gentleman, every man unto his charge
Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls:
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

KING RICHARD III: Let us to it pell-mell,
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.

KING RICHARD III: A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

KING RICHARD III: Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: For they say every why hath a wherefore.

ABBESS: In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest
To be disturbed would mad man or beast.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE: And thereupon these errors are arose.

SLY: I'll not budge an inch, boy.

LORD: O monstrous beast! how like a swine he lies!
Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!

SLY: Come, madam wife, sit by my side and let the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger.

LUCENTIO: Here let us breathe and haply institute
A course of learning and ingenious studies.

TRANIO: Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you.

TRANIO: No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.

HORTENSIO: Faith, as you say, there's small choice in rotten apples.

GREMIO: O this learning, what a thing it is!

PETRUCHIO: And kiss me, Kate, we will be married o'Sunday.

BIANCA: Old fashions please me best; I am not so nice,
To change true rules for old inventions.

PETRUCHIO: This is a way to kill a wife with kindness;
And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humour.

WIDOW: He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

TITUS: Hail, Rome, victorious in thy mourning weeds!

TITUS: There greet in silence, as the dead are wont,
And sleep in peace, slain in your country's wars!
O sacred receptacle of my joys,
Sweet cell of virtue and nobility,
How many sons of mine hast thou in store,
That thou wilt never render to me more!

TAMORA: O cruel, irreligious piety!

TITUS: In peace and honour rest you here, my sons;
Rome's readiest champions, repose you here in rest,
Secure from worldly chances and mishaps!
Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
Here grow no damned drugs, here are no storms,
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep:
In peace and honour rest you here, my sons!

MARCUS: Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp'd,
Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.

TITUS: Hear me, grave fathers! noble tribunes, stay!
For pity of mine age, whose youth was spent
In dangerous wars, whilst you securely slept;
For all my blood in Rome's great quarrel shed,
For all the frosty nights that I have watch'd,
And for these bitter tears, which now you see
Filling the agèd wrinkles in my cheeks;
Be pitiful to my condemnèd sons,
Whose souls are not corrupted as 'tis thought.

TITUS: For two and twenty sons I never wept,
Because they died in honour's lofty bed;
For these, these, tribunes, in the dust I write
My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears.

TITUS: Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones,
Who though they cannot answer my distress,
Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes,
For that they will not intercept my tale:
When I do weep they humbly at my feet
Receive my tears and seem to weep with me.

TITUS: Rome could afford no tribune like to these.
A stone is soft as wax, tribunes more hard than stones:
A stone is silent, and offendeth not,
And tribunes with their tongues doom men to death.

TITUS: Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive
That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?
Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey
But me and mine.

TITUS: What fool hath added water to the sea,
Or brought a faggot to bright-burning Troy?
My grief was at the height before thou camest,
And now like Nilus, it disdaineth bounds.

TITUS: It was my deer; and he that wounded her
Hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead.

TITUS: For now I stand as one upon a rock
Environed with a wilderness of sea,
Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave,
Expecting ever when some envious surge
Will in his brinish bowels swallow him.

MARCUS: O brother, speak with possibilities,
And do not break into these deep extremes.

TITUS: If there were reason for these miseries,
Then into limits could I bind my woes.

TITUS: Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet
And by still practise learn to know thy meaning.

MARCUS: Alas, my lord, I have but kill'd a fly.

TITUS: But how, if that fly had a father and mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings,
And buzz lamenting doings in the air!

MARCUS: O, why should nature build so foul a den,
Unless the gods delight in tragedies?

AARON: Pray to the devils; the gods have given us over.

CHIRON: Thou hast undone our mother.

AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.

AARON: Coal-black is better than another hue,
In that it scorns to bear another hue;
For all the water in the ocean
Can never turn the swan's black legs to white,
Although she lave them hourly in the flood.

LUCIUS: Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

AARON: Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.

AARON: Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'

LUCIUS: As for that ravenous tiger, Tamora,
No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weed,
No mournful bell shall ring her burial;
But throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey.
Her life was beastly and devoid of pity;
And, being dead, let birds on her take pity.

KING: Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register'd upon our brazen tombs
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
The endeavor of this present breath may buy
That honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge
And make us heirs of all eternity.

KING: Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.

BEROWNE: What is the end of study? let me know.

KING: Why, that to know, which else we should not know.

BEROWNE: Things hid and barr'd, you mean, from common sense?

KING: Ay, that is study's godlike recompense.

BEROWNE: Come on, then; I will swear to study so,
To know the thing I am forbid to know.

BEROWNE: Small have continual plodders ever won
Save base authority from others' books.

BEROWNE: These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights
That give a name to every fixed star
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.

BEROWNE: So study evermore is overshot:
While it doth study to have what it would
It doth forget to do the thing it should.

KING: Ay, that there is. Our court, you know, is haunted
A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;
One whom the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony.

COSTARD: When would you have it done, sir?

BEROWNE: This afternoon.

COSTARD: Well, I will do it, sir: fare you well.

BEROWNE: Thou knowest not what it is.

COSTARD: I shall know, sir, when I have done it.

BEROWNE: What, I! I love! I sue! I seek a wife!
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch,
But being watch'd that it may still go right!

HOLOFERNES: This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.

HOLOFERNES: A good lustre of conceit in a tuft of earth; fire enough for a flint, pearl enough for a swine. 'Tis pretty; it is well.

BEROWNE: From women's eyes this doctrine I derive;
They are the ground, the books, the academes
From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.

BEROWNE: Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.

HOLOFERNES: He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.

HOLOFERNES: Via, goodman Dull! Thou hast spoken no word all this while.

DULL: Nor understood none neither, sir.

KATHARINE: He made her melancholy, sad, and heavy;
And so she died: had she been light, like you,
Of such a merry, nimble, stirring spirit,
She might ha' been a grandam ere she died:
And so may you; for a light heart lives long.

BEROWNE: This fellow pecks up wit as pigeons pease,
And utters it again when God doth please.

PRINCESS: A time, methinks, too short
To make a world-without-end bargain in.

ROSALINE: A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.

ARMADO: The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way: we this way.

LYSANDER: You have her father's love, Demetrius;
Let me have Hermia's: do you marry him.

LYSANDER: The course of true love never did run smooth.

HERMIA: By all the vows that ever men have broke,
In number more than ever women spoke.

HELENA: Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.

FLUTE: Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming.

BOTTOM: I'll speak in a monstrous little voice.

FAIRY: Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere.

FAIRY: Are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?

PUCK: Thou speak'st aright;
I am that merry wanderer of the night.

OBERON: Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.

TITANIA: Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.

PUCK: I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.

BOTTOM: A calendar, a calendar! look in the almanac.

PUCK: I'll follow you, I'll lead you about a round,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier:
Sometime a horse I'll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.

BOTTOM: And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.

PUCK: For briers and thorns at their apparel snatch;
Some sleeves, some hats, from yielders all things catch.

PUCK: I go, I go; look how I go,
Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow.

PUCK: Lord, what fools these mortals be!

PUCK: And those things do best please me
That befall preposterously.

HERMIA: Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,
The ear more quick of apprehension makes;
Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,
It pays the hearing double recompense.

HELENA: And though she be but little, she is fierce.

PUCK: Damned spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone;
For fear lest day should look their shames upon,
They willfully themselves exile from light
And must for aye consort with black-brow'd night.

OBERON: Then, my queen, in silence sad,
Trip we after the night's shade:
We the globe can compass soon,
Swifter than the wandering moon.

HIPPOLYTA: I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

BOTTOM: I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.

BOTTOM: And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy. No more words: away! go, away!

THESEUS: The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.

THESEUS: The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

THESEUS: Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

THESEUS: That is some satire, keen and critical.

THESEUS: "A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth."
Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief?
That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow.
How shall we find the concord of this discord?

PHILOSTRATE: A play there is, my lord, some ten words long,
Which is as brief as I have known a play;
But by ten words, my lord, it is too long,
Which makes it tedious; for in all the play
There is not one word apt, one player fitted.

PROLOGUE: That is the true beginning of our end.

DEMETRIUS: It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord.

THESEUS: The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

PUCK: If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.

PUCK: Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

CHORUS: From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life.

MONTAGUE: Away from light steals home my heavy son
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out
And makes himself an artificial night.

MONTAGUE: Black and portentous must this humour prove.

ROMEO: Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears.

ROMEO: What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.

ROMEO: Tut, I have lost myself; I am not here.

SERVANT: I pray, sir, can you read?

ROMEO: Ay, mine own fortune in my misery.

SERVANT: Perhaps you have learned it without book.

BENVOLIO: Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by:
Herself poised with herself in either eye:
But in that crystal scales let there be weigh'd
Your lady's love against some other maid
That I will show you shining at this feast,
And she shall scant show well that now seems best.

NURSE: And then my husband -- God be with his soul,
A' was a merry man -- took up the child,
'Yea,' quoth he, 'dost thou fall upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit,
Wilt thou not, Jule?'

NURSE: An honour! Were not I thine only nurse,
I would say thou hadst suck'd wisdom from thy teat.

LADY CAPULET: Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face,
And find delight writ there with beauty's pen.

ROMEO: I dream'd a dream to-night.

MERCUTIO: And so did I.

ROMEO: Well, what was yours?

MERCUTIO: That dreamers often lie.

ROMEO: Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace.
Thou talk'st of nothing.

MERCUTIO: True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air...

ROMEO: I fear, too early: for my mind misgives
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's revels and expire the term
Of a despised life closed in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.

CAPULET: Welcome, gentlemen. I have seen the day
That I have worn a visor and could tell
A whispering tale in a fair lady's ear,
Such as would please. 'Tis gone, 'tis gone, 'tis gone.

ROMEO: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright.
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear --
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.

ROMEO: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

JULIET: My only love sprung from my only hate.
Too early seen unknown, and known too late.

CHORUS: But passion lends them power, time means, to meet
Tempering extremities with extreme sweet.

MERCUTIO: If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.

ROMEO: He jests at scars that never felt a wound.

ROMEO: But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

ROMEO: Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.

ROMEO: See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand.
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek.

JULIET: O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

JULIET: What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man.

JULIET: What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

JULIET: Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

ROMEO: With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls,
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do that dares love attempt.

JULIET: O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

JULIET: I have no joy of this contract to-night:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say 'It lightens.'

JULIET: My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.

ROMEO: I would I were thy bird.

JULIET: Sweet, so would I:
Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing.

JULIET: Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.

FRIAR LAURENCE: The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave that is her womb.

FRIAR LAURENCE: O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities.
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give.

FRIAR LAURENCE: Virtue itself turns vice being misapplied;
And vice sometime's by action dignified.

FRIAR LAURENCE: Be plain, good son, and homely in thy drift;
Riddling confession finds but riddling shrift.

FRIAR LAURENCE: Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.

MERCUTIO: Any man that can write may answer a letter.

MERCUTIO: Now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature.

NURSE: I pray you, sir, what saucy merchant was this, that was so full of his ropery?

ROMEO: A gentleman, nurse, that loves to hear himself talk, and will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month.

JULIET: But old folks, many feign as they were dead;
Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead.

FRIAR LAURENCE: These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume.

FRIAR LAURENCE: The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness,
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so.

FRIAR LAURENCE: Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

JULIET: Conceit, more rich in matter than in words,
Brags of his substance, not of ornament.

BENVOLIO: I pray thee, good Mercutio, let's retire:
The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,
And, if we meet, we shall not scape a brawl;
For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.

MERCUTIO: Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes.

MERCUTIO: Men's eyes were made to look, and let them gaze;
I will not budge for no man's pleasure, I.

MERCUTIO: A plague o' both your houses.

BENVOLIO: What, art thou hurt?

MERCUTIO: Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch; marry, 'tis enough.

ROMEO: Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.

MERCUTIO: No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.

MERCUTIO: A plague o' both your houses,
They have made worms' meat of me.

ROMEO: O, I am fortune's fool!

JULIET: So tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.

JULIET: O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?

NURSE: There's no trust,
No faith, no honesty in men; all perjured,
All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers.

JULIET: 'Romeo is banished!'
There is no end, no limit, measure, bound,
In that word's death; no words can that woe sound.

FRIAR LAURENCE: Hence from Verona art thou banished.
Be patient, for the world is broad and wide.

FRIAR LAURENCE: Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy,
To comfort thee, though thou art banished.

FRIAR LAURENCE: Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven and earth?
Since birth, and heaven, and earth all three do meet
In thee at once; which thou at once wouldst lose.

FRIAR LAURENCE: Happiness courts thee in her best array;
But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,
Thou pout'st upon thy fortune and thy love:
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.

CAPULET: And there an end.

JULIET: Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

ROMEO: Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

JULIET: I must hear from thee every day in the hour,
For in a minute there are many days.

JULIET: O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee, now thou art below,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb:
Either my eyesight fails, or thou look'st pale.

LADY CAPULET: Evermore weeping for your cousin's death?
What, wilt thou wash him from his grave with tears?

LADY CAPULET: Therefore, have done: some grief shows much of love;
But much of grief shows still some want of wit.

CAPULET: How now, how now! Chopp'd logic? What is this?

JULIET: Chain me with roaring bears;
Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,
O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls;
Or bid me go into a new-made grave
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud;
Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble;
And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstain'd wife to my sweet love.

FRIAR LAURENCE: Take thou this vial, being then in bed,
And this distilled liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease.

JULIET: I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,
That almost freezes up the heat of life.

JULIET: My dismal scene I needs must act alone.

JULIET: Or, if I live, is it not very like,
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place,
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle
Where for these many hundred years the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are pack'd,
Where bloody Tybalt yet but green in earth
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort --
Alack, alack!

CAPULET: Death lies on her like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.

CAPULET: Death, that hath ta'en her hence to make me wail
Ties up my tongue and will not let me speak.

CAPULET: All things that we ordained festival
Turn from their office to black funeral:
Our instruments to melancholy bells,
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast;
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change,
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,
And all things change them to the contrary.

PETER: I will carry no crotchets: I'll re you, I'll fa you; do you note me?

ROMEO: Ah me, how sweet is love itself possess'd
When but love's shadows are so rich in joy.

ROMEO: Famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes,
Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back.
The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law;
The world affords no law to make thee rich;
Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.

ROMEO: There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murders in this loathsome world,
Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.

ROMEO: Ah, dear Juliet,
Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe
That unsubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

ROMEO: O true apothecary,
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

JULIET: Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end.
O churl. Drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after? I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them.

LADY CAPULET: O me! This sight of death is as a bell
That warns my old age to a sepulchre.

PRINCE: Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

PRINCE: Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

RICHARD: The accuser and the accused freely speak:
High-stomach'd are they both, and full of ire,
In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.

BOLINGBROKE: Thou art a traitor and a miscreant,
Too good to be so and too bad to live,
Since the more fair and crystal is the sky,
The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly.

RICHARD: Deep malice makes too deep incision.

RICHARD: Forget, forgive; conclude and be agreed;
Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.

MOWBRAY: The purest treasure mortal times afford
Is spotless reputation: that away,
Men are but gilded loam or painted clay.

GAUNT: All places that the eye of heaven visits
Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.

GAUNT: O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony:
Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain,
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.

YORK: Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity--
So it be new, there's no respect how vile--
That is not quickly buzzed into his ears?

GAUNT: His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder:
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.

GAUNT: This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings.

YORK: Comfort's in heaven; and we are on the earth,
Where nothing lives but crosses, cares and grief.

YORK: But time will not permit: all is uneven,
And every thing is left at six and seven.

NORTHUMBERLAND: These high wild hills and rough uneven ways
Draws out our miles, and makes them wearisome.

RICHARD: His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day.

RICHARD: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd ...

SCROOPE: Men judge by the complexion of the sky
The state and inclination of the day.

SCROOPE: I play the torturer, by small and small
To lengthen out the worst that must be spoken.

RICHARD: Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king,
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.

RICHARD: Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.

RICHARD: I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

ANTONIO: In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.

GRATIANO: You have too much respect upon the world:
They lose it that do buy it with much care.

BASSANIO: Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice.

BASSANIO: His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.

BASSANIO: In my school-days, when I had lost one shaft,
I shot his fellow of the self-same flight
The self-same way with more advised watch,
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both
I oft found both.

NERISSA: Yet, for aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.

ANTONIO: Mark you this, Bassanio,
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

SHYLOCK: Fast bind, fast find.

GRATIANO: All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoy'd.

MOROCCO: (Reads) All that glisters is not gold.

MOROCCO: (Reads) Gilded tombs do worms enfold.

SHYLOCK: I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

PORTIA: Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart, or in the head?

BASSANIO: The world is still deceived with ornament.

BASSANIO: In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil?

BASSANIO: In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?

BASSANIO: There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.

ANTONIO: I pray thee, hear me speak.

SHYLOCK: I'll have my bond; I will not hear thee speak:
I'll have my bond; and therefore speak no more.

PORTIA: For in companions
That do converse and waste the time together,
Whose souls do bear an equal yoke of love,
There must be needs a like proportion
Of lineaments, of manners and of spirit.

LORENZO: How every fool can play upon the word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none only but parrots.

DUKE: I beseech you, let his lack of years be no impediment to let him lack a reverend estimation; for I never knew so young a body with so old a head.

PORTIA: The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath.

SHYLOCK: You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live.

PORTIA: He is well paid that is well satisfied.

LORENZO: Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

LORENZO: The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

PORTIA: How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

PORTIA: The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark,
When neither is attended.

AUSTRIA: The peace of heaven is theirs that lift their swords
In such a just and charitable war.

KING PHILIP: This little abstract doth contain that large
Which died in Geffrey, and the hand of time
Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume.

BASTARD: O, now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel;
The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs;
And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men,
In undetermined differences of kings.

BASTARD: Zounds! I was never so bethump'd with words
Since I first call'd my brother's father dad.

BASTARD: Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.

BASTARD: Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back,
When gold and silver becks me to come on.

CONSTANCE: No, I defy all counsel, all redress,
But that which ends all counsel, true redress,
Death, death; O amiable lovely death!

CONSTANCE: Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

PANDULPH: No natural exhalation in the sky,
No scope of nature, no distemper'd day,
No common wind, no customed event,
But they will pluck away his natural cause
And call them meteors, prodigies and signs.

SALISBURY: Therefore, to be possess'd with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

PEMBROKE: This act is as an ancient tale new told.

KING JOHN: There is no sure foundation set on blood,
No certain life achieved by others' death.

HUBERT: My lord, they say five moons were seen to-night;
Four fixed, and the fifth did whirl about
The other four in wondrous motion.

PRINCE: Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.

FALSTAFF: O, thou hast damnable iteration and art indeed able to corrupt a saint.

PRINCE: I see a good amendment of life in thee; from praying to purse-taking.

FALSTAFF: Why, Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal; 'tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.

PRINCE: Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

PRINCE: If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.

PRINCE: By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.

HOTSPUR: And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He call'd them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.

FALSTAFF: If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.

FALSTAFF: If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned: if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh's lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord; banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins; but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry's company, banish not him thy Harry's company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!

GLENDOWER: These signs have mark'd me extraordinary;
And all the courses of my life do show
I am not in the roll of common men.

GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

KING HENRY IV: By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wonder'd at.

FALSTAFF: I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be; virtuous enough; swore little; diced not above seven times a week; went to a bawdy-house once in a quarter--of an hour; paid money that I borrowed, three of four times; lived well and in good compass: and now I live out of all order, out of all compass.

HOTSPUR: But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool; And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop.

HOTSPUR: O, I could prophesy,
But that the earthy and cold hand of death
Lies on my tongue: no, Percy, thou art dust
And food for-- <dies>

PRINCE: For worms, brave Percy: fare thee well, great heart.

PRINCE: Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk!
When that this body did contain a spirit,
A kingdom for it was too small a bound;
But now two paces of the vilest earth
Is room enough.

FALSTAFF: The better part of valour is discretion.

SLENDER: But if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance, when we are married and have more occasion to know one another.

SLENDER: I hope upon familiarity will grow more contempt.

PISTOL: Why, then the world's mine oyster.
Which I with sword will open.

ANNE: O, what a world of vile ill-favor'd faults
Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year.

ANNE: Alas, I had rather be set quick i' the earth
And bowl'd to death with turnips!

MISTRESS PAGE: We'll leave a proof by that which we will do,
Wives may be merry, and yet honest too.

FALSTAFF: They say there is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death.

MISTRESS PAGE: Against such lewdsters and their lechery
Those that betray them do no treachery.

LEONATO: How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping!

BEATRICE: He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat; it ever changes with the next block.

MESSENGER: I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books.

BEATRICE: No; an he were, I would burn my study.

BEATRICE: Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?

BENEDICK: That a woman conceived me, I thank her; that she brought me up, I likewise give her most humble thanks: but that I will have a recheat winded in my forehead, or hang my bugle in an invisible baldrick, all women shall pardon me.

BENEDICK: Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none; and the fine is, for the which I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor.

DON PEDRO: What need the bridge much broader than the flood?

DON JOHN: I cannot hide what I am: I must be sad when I have cause and smile at no man's jests, eat when I have stomach and wait for no man's leisure, sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man's business, laugh when I am merry and claw no man in his humour.

LEONATO: You may light on a husband that hath no beard.

BEATRICE: What should I do with him? Dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting-gentlewoman?

BEATRICE: He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man: and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.

LEONATO: Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband.

BEATRICE: Not till God make men of some other metal than earth.

BEATRICE: For, hear me, Hero: wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque pace: the first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly-modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance and, with his bad legs, falls into the cinque pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.

URSULA: Come, come, do you think I do not know you by your excellent wit? can virtue hide itself? Go to, mum, you are he: graces will appear, and there's an end.

CLAUDIO: Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch
Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
This is an accident of hourly proof.

BENEDICK: She speaks poniards, and every word stabs.

DON PEDRO: Will you have me, lady?

BEATRICE: No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your grace is too costly to wear every day. But, I beseech your grace, pardon me: I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.

BENEDICK: He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier; and now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.

DON PEDRO: It is the witness still of excellency
To put a strange face on his own perfection.

BALTHASAR: There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting.

BENEDICK: Now, divine air! now is his soul ravished! Is it not strange that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?

BALTHASAR: Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny, nonny.

BENEDICK: I may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me, because I have railed so long against marriage: but doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

BENEDICK: When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

URSULA: The pleasant'st angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait.

URSULA: She's limed, I warrant you: we have caught her, madam.

HERO: If it proves so, then loving goes by haps:
Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.

BENEDICK: Well, every one can master a grief but he that has it.

BORACHIO: Thou shouldst rather ask if it were possible any villany should be so rich; for when rich villains have need of poor ones, poor ones may make what price they will.

LEONATO: Neighbours, you are tedious.

DOGBERRY: It pleases your worship to say so, but we are the poor duke's officers; but truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a king, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all of your worship.

LEONATO: Hath no man's dagger here a point for me?

FRIAR FRANCIS: Of every hearer: for it so falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack'd and lost,
Why, then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours.

BEATRICE: Is he not approved in the height a villain, that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman? O that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands; and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour, -- O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place.

BEATRICE: O that I were a man for his sake! or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into courtesies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones too: he is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it.

BEATRICE: I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.

LEONATO: I pray thee, cease thy counsel,
Which falls into mine ears as profitless
As water in a sieve.

LEONATO: Bring me a father that so loved his child,
Whose joy of her is overwhelm'd like mine,
And bid him speak of patience;
Measure his woe the length and breadth of mine
And let it answer every strain for strain,
As thus for thus and such a grief for such,
In every lineament, branch, shape, and form:
If such a one will smile and stroke his beard,
Bid sorrow wag, cry 'hem!' when he should groan,
Patch grief with proverbs, make misfortune drunk
With candle-wasters; bring him yet to me,
And I of him will gather patience.

LEONATO: No, no; 'tis all men's office to speak patience
To those that wring under the load of sorrow,
But no man's virtue nor sufficiency
To be so moral when he shall endure
The like himself.

LEONATO: For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods
And made a push at chance and sufferance.

LEONATO: Here stand a pair of honourable men;
A third is fled, that had a hand in it.
I thank you, princes, for my daughter's death:
Record it with your high and worthy deeds:
'Twas bravely done, if you bethink you of it.

BENEDICK: Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried: I can find out no rhyme to 'lady' but 'baby', an innocent rhyme; for 'scorn', 'horn,' a hard rhyme; for, 'school', 'fool', a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings.

BENEDICK: No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.

BENEDICK: Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram?

RUMOUR: Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?

RUMOUR: Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it.

NORTHUMBERLAND: What news, Lord Bardolph? every minute now
Should be the father of some stratagem.

NORTHUMBERLAND: The times are wild: contention, like a horse
Full of high feeding, madly hath broke loose
And bears down all before him.

NORTHUMBERLAND: Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news
Hath but a losing office, and his tongue
Sounds ever after as a sullen bell,
Remember'd tolling a departing friend.

NORTHUMBERLAND: And let this world no longer be a stage
To feed contention in a lingering act;
But let one spirit of the first-born Cain
Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set
On bloody courses, the rude scene may end,
And darkness be the burier of the dead!

FALSTAFF: I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.

CHIEF JUSTICE: Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye? a dry hand? a yellow cheek? a white beard? a decreasing leg? an increasing belly? is not your voice broken? your wind short? your chin double? your wit single? and every part about you blasted with antiquity? and will you yet call yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John!

FALSTAFF: I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

ARCHBISHOP OF YORK: An habitation giddy and unsure
Hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.

ARCHBISHOP OF YORK: Past and to come seems best; things present worst.

HASTINGS: We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone.

PRINCE: Well, thus we play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.

LADY NORTHUMBERLAND: I have given over, I will speak no more.

POINS: Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

KING HENRY IV: Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

KING HENRY IV: O God! that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea!

KING HENRY IV: O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.

FALSTAFF: We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

MOWBRAY: We shall be winnow'd with so rough a wind
That even our corn shall seem as light as chaff
And good from bad find no partition.

KING HENRY IV: Chide him for faults, and do it reverently,
When thou perceive his blood inclined to mirth;
But, being moody, give him line and scope,
Till that his passions, like a whale on ground,
Confound themselves with working.

KING HENRY IV: The blood weeps from my heart when I do shape
In forms imaginary the unguided days
And rotten times that you shall look upon
When I am sleeping with my ancestors.

CLARENCE: The incessant care and labour of his mind
Hath wrought the mure that should confine it in
So thin that life looks through and will break out.

KING HENRY IV: For this the foolish over-careful fathers
Have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care,
Their bones with industry;
For this they have engrossed and piled up
The canker'd heaps of strange-achieved gold;
For this they have been thoughtful to invest
Their sons with arts and martial exercises:
When, like the bee, culling from every flower
The virtuous sweets,
Our thighs pack'd with wax, our mouths with honey,
We bring it to the hive, and, like the bees,
Are murdered for our pains.

KING HENRY IV: Thou hidest a thousand daggers in thy thoughts,
Which thou hast whetted on thy stony heart,
To stab at half an hour of my life.

KING HENRY IV: Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.

FALSTAFF: My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!

KING HENRY V: I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.

KING HENRY V: How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.

CHORUS: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.

CHORUS: Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

CHORUS: O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.

ELY: The strawberry grows underneath the nettle
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
Neighbour'd by fruit of baser quality.

KING HENRY V: Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,
How you awake our sleeping sword of war.
We charge you in the name of God take heed,
For never two such kingdoms did contend
Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops
Are every one a woe, a sore complaint
'Gainst him whose wrong gives edge unto the swords
That make such waste in brief mortality.

CANTERBURY: To fill King Edward's fame with prisoner kings
And make her chronicle as rich with praise
As is the ooze and bottom of the sea
With sunken wreck and sunless treasuries.

WESTMORELAND: For once the eagle England being in prey,
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking and so sucks her princely eggs,
Playing the mouse in absence of the cat,
To tear and havoc more than she can eat.

CANTERBURY: For so work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts,
Where some like magistrates correct at home,
Others like merchants venture trade abroad,
Others like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds,
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor,
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold,
The civil citizens kneading up the honey,
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate,
The sad-eyed justice with his surly hum
Delivering o'er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.

FIRST AMBASSADOR: He therefore sends you, meeter for your spirit,
This tun of treasure; and, in lieu of this,
Desires you let the dukedoms that you claim
Hear no more of you. This the Dauphin speaks.

KING HENRY V: What treasure, uncle?

EXETER: Tennis-balls, my liege.

KING HENRY V: When we have match'd our rackets to these balls,
We will in France, by God's grace, play a set
Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.
Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler
That all the courts of France will be disturb'd
With chases.

KING HENRY V: For many a thousand widows
Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands;
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn.

KING HENRY V: So get you hence in peace; and tell the Dauphin
His jest will savour but of shallow wit,
When thousands weep more than did laugh at it.

CHORUS: Now all the youth of England are on fire,
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies.

CHORUS: O England: model to thy inward greatness,
Like little body with a mighty heart,
What mightst thou do, that honour would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural?

BEDFORD: The king hath note of all that they intend,
By interception which they dream not of.

KING HENRY V: If little faults, proceeding on distemper,
Shall not be wink'd at, how shall we stretch our eye
When capital crimes, chew'd, swallow'd and digested,
Appear before us?

BARDOLPH: Would I were with him, wheresome're he is, either in heaven or in hell.

HOSTESS: Nay, sure, he's not in hell. He's in Arthur's bosom if ever man went to Arthur's bosom.

HOSTESS: A' made a finer end and went away an it had been any christom child; a' parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o' the tide, for after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green fields.

DAUPHIN: Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin
As self-neglecting.

EXETER: Therefore in fierce tempest is he coming,
In thunder and in earthquake, like a Jove,
That, if requiring fail, he will compel;
And bids you, in the bowels of the Lord,
Deliver up the crown, and to take mercy
On the poor souls for whom this hungry war
Opens his vasty jaws; and on your head
Turning the widows' tears, the orphans' cries
The dead men's blood, the pining maidens groans,
For husbands, fathers and betrothed lovers,
That shall be swallow'd in this controversy.

CHORUS: Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies
In motion of no less celerity
Than that of thought.

KING HENRY V: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead!

KING HENRY V: In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility.
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage.

KING HENRY V: Let us swear
That you are worth your breeding, which I doubt not,
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.

KING HENRY V: I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot.

KING HENRY V: Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villainy.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds...

FLUELLEN: By your patience, Aunchient Pistol. Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation: and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls: in good truth, the poet makes a most excellent description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral.

KING HENRY V: For when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

DAUPHIN: I will not change my horse with any that treads but on four pasterns. Ca, ha! he bounds from the earth, as if his entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus, chez les narines de feu! When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.

CONSTABLE: Doing is activity; and he will still be doing.

ORLEANS: He never did harm, that I heard of.

CONSTABLE: Nor will do none to-morrow: he will keep that good name still.

CHORUS: Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.

GOWER: Why, the enemy is loud; you hear him all night.

FLUELLEN: If the enemy is an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb, is it meet, think you, that we should also, look you, be an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb? in your own conscience, now?

WILLIAMS: But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.

KING HENRY V: What infinite heart's-ease
Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!
And what have kings, that privates have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?
And what art thou, thou idle ceremony?

KING HENRY V: No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body fill'd and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,
And follows so the ever-running year,
With profitable labour, to his grave:

KING HENRY V: O God of battles! steel my soldiers' hearts;
Possess them not with fear; take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them.

KING HENRY V: Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.

KING HENRY V: This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd.

KING HENRY V: We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

BOURBON: The devil take order now! I'll to the throng:
Let life be short; else shame will be too long.

BURGUNDY: Llet it not disgrace me,
If I demand, before this royal view,
What rub or what impediment there is,
Why that the naked, poor and mangled Peace,
Dear nurse of arts and joyful births,
Should not in this best garden of the world
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?

KATHARINE: O bon Dieu! les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies.

KING HENRY V: If thou canst love me for this, take me. If not, to say to thee that I shall die, is true, but for thy love, by the Lord, no. Yet I love thee too.

KING HENRY V: A speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly.

KING HENRY V: But, good Kate, mock me mercifully, the rather, gentle princess, because I love thee cruelly.

KING HENRY V: O Kate, nice customs curtsy to great kings. Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate, and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults.

KING HENRY V: You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate.

CHORUS: Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursued the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

CHORUS: Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed.

MARULLUS: You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey?

MARULLUS: And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way
That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?

SOOTHSAYER: Beware the ides of March.

CASSIUS: Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?

BRUTUS: No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself,
But by reflection, by some other things.

CASSIUS: I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.

CASSIUS: Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

CASSIUS: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

CAESAR: Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

CAESAR: Such men as he be never at heart's ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.

CASCA: But those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.

CASCA: Are not you moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm?

CICERO: Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time:
But men may construe things after their fashion,
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

CASSIUS: For my part, I have walk'd about the streets,
Submitting me unto the perilous night,
And, thus unbraced, Casca, as you see,
Have bared my bosom to the thunder-stone;
And when the cross blue lightning seem'd to open
The breast of heaven, I did present myself
Even in the aim and very flash of it.

BRUTUS: Look in the calendar, and bring me word.

BRUTUS: Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.

BRUTUS: The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

BRUTUS: O conspiracy,
Shamest thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,
When evils are most free? O, then by day
Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough
To mask thy monstrous visage?

Stage direction: Clock strikes.

BRUTUS: Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies,
Which busy care draws in the brains of men;
Therefore thou sleep'st so sound.

CAESAR: What can be avoided
Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?

CALPURNIA: When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

CAESAR: Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

CAESAR: Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

TREBONIUS: Caesar, I will.
Aside: And so near will I be,
That your best friends shall wish I had been further.

CASSIUS: But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.

CASSIUS: The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks,
They are all fire and every one doth shine,
But there's but one in all doth hold his place.

BRUTUS: Fates, we will know your pleasures:
That we shall die, we know; 'tis but the time
And drawing days out, that men stand upon.

ANTONY: O mighty Caesar! dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure?

ANTONY: The choice and master spirits of this age.

ANTONY: And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry "Havoc," and let slip the dogs of war.

BRUTUS: If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.

ANTONY: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

ANTONY: I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

ANTONY: When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept;
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

ANTONY Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

ANTONY: This was the most unkindest cut of all.

ANTONY: For when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms,
Quite vanquish'd him.

ANTONY: Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,
Take thou what course thou wilt.

CINNA THE POET: Truly, my name is Cinna.

FIRST CITIZEN: Tear him to pieces! He's a conspirator.

CINNA THE POET: I am Cinna the poet! I am Cinna the poet!

FOURTH CITIZEN: Tear him for his bad verses! Tear him for his bad verses!

OCTAVIUS: Let us do so: for we are at the stake,
And bay'd about with many enemies;
And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear,
Millions of mischiefs.

BRUTUS: When love begins to sicken and decay,
It useth an enforced ceremony.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith;
But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,
Make gallant show and promise of their mettle.

BRUTUS: There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

CASSIUS: For Cassius is aweary of the world;
Hated by one he loves; braved by his brother;
Cheque'd like a bondman; all his faults observed,
Set in a note-book, learn'd, and conn'd by rote,
To cast into my teeth.

BRUTUS: For ever, and for ever, farewell, Cassius!
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
If not, why then, this parting was well made.

BRUTUS: O, that a man might know
The end of this day's business ere it come!
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.

CASSIUS: This day I breathed first: time is come round,
And where I did begin, there shall I end;
My life is run his compass.

ANTONY: This was the noblest Roman of them all.

ANTONY: His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world "This was a man!"

CELIA: Well said: that was laid on with a trowel.

ORLANDO: Only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.

ROSALIND: My pride fell with my fortune.

ROSALIND: O, how full of briers is this working-day world!

ROSALIND: Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.

DUKE SENIOR: And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

ORLANDO: Thou art not for the fashion of these times,
Where none will sweat but for promotion.

TOUCHSTONE: Ay, now am I in Arden; the more fool I. When I was at home I was in a better place, but travellers must be content.

JAQUES: I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs.

DUKE SENIOR: If he, compact of jars, grow musical,
We shall have shortly discord in the spheres.

JAQUES: And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock:
Thus we may see,' quoth he, 'how the world wags.'

JAQUES: 'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot.

JAQUES: And thereby hangs a tale.

DUKE SENIOR: True is it that we have seen better days.

JAQUES: And in his brain,
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit
After a voyage, he hath strange places crammed
With observation, the which he vents
In mangled forms.

JAQUES: All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

JAQUES: At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

JAQUES: And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

JAQUES: Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth.

JAQUES: The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

JAQUES: Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

CORIN: No more but that I know the more one sickens the worse at ease he is; and that he that wants money, means and content is without three good friends; that the property of rain is to wet and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun; that he that hath learned no wit by nature nor art may complain of good breeding or comes of a very dull kindred.

TOUCHSTONE: When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child Understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

ROSALIND: 'Tis such fools as you
That makes the world full of ill-favour'd children.

JAQUES: Why, 'tis good to be sad and say nothing.

ROSALIND: Why then, 'tis good to be a post.

JAQUES: I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation, nor the musician's, which is fantastical, nor the courtier's, which is proud, nor the soldier's, which is ambitious, nor the lawyer's, which is politic, nor the lady's, which is nice, nor the lover's, which is all these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

ROSALIND: A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's.

ROSALIND: Am not I your Rosalind?

ORLANDO: For ever and a day.

ROSALIND: I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry; I will laugh like a hyena, and that when thou art inclined to sleep.

TOUCHSTONE: Your If is the only peacemaker; much virtue in If.

BERNARDO: Have you had quiet guard?

FRANCISCO: Not a mouse stirring.

HORATIO: But soft, behold! lo, where it comes again!
I'll cross it, though it blast me. Stay, illusion!

HORATIO: If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me!

MARCELLUS: Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.

CLAUDIUS: The head is not more native to the heart,
The hand more instrumental to the mouth,
Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father.

HAMLET: A little more than kin, and less than kind.

GERTRUDE: Do not forever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

HAMLET: Ay, madam, it is common.

HAMLET: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

HAMLET: That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly.

HAMLET: Let me not think on't -- Frailty, thy name is woman!

HAMLET: My father! -- methinks I see my father.

HORATIO: Where, my lord?

HAMLET: In my mind's eye, Horatio.

HORATIO: I saw him once; he was a goodly king.

HAMLET: He was a man. Take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

HAMLET: Foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.

LAERTES: Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.

POLONIUS: Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man.

POLONIUS: Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

POLONIUS: This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

HAMLET: But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honour'd in the breach than the observance.

HAMLET: Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

HAMLET: Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee.

MARCELLUS: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

GHOST: But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

GHOST: Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.

HAMLET: O my prophetic soul!

HAMLET: Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.

HAMLET: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

HAMLET: The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

POLONIUS: And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out.

POLONIUS: My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.

POLONIUS: Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad.

GERTRUDE: More matter, with less art.

POLONIUS: That he is mad, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity;
And pity 'tis 'tis true.

HAMLET: O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers; I have not art to reckon my groans.

POLONIUS: If circumstances lead me, I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the centre.

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord?

HAMLET: Words, words, words.

POLONIUS: Will you walk out of the air, my lord?

HAMLET: Into my grave.

POLONIUS: Indeed, that is out o' the air.

HAMLET: What's the news?

ROSENCRANTZ: None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest.

HAMLET: Then is doomsday near.

HAMLET: Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

HAMLET: O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

HAMLET: I have of late -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

HAMLET: What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

HAMLET: Man delights not me -- no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

HAMLET: I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.

POLONIUS: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.

HAMLET: For the play, I remember, pleased not the million; 'twas caviare to the general.

HAMLET: Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.

POLONIUS: My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

HAMLET: God's bodikin, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?

HAMLET: Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.

HAMLET: What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?

HAMLET: For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.

HAMLET: The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

HAMLET: To be, or not to be: that is the question.

HAMLET: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.

HAMLET: To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.

HAMLET: To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

HAMLET: For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

HAMLET: Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

HAMLET: Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

OPHELIA: Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.

HAMLET: Get thee to a nunnery.

HAMLET: What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us.

HAMLET: I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.

OPHELIA: O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

CLAUDIUS: Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.

HAMLET: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue.

HAMLET: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

HAMLET: Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature.

HAMLET: For any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

HAMLET: Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.

HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

OPHELIA: No, my lord.

HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap?

OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.

HAMLET: Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?

OPHELIA: 'Tis brief, my lord.

HAMLET: As woman's love.

PLAYER QUEEN: Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.

PLAYER KING: Purpose is but the slave to memory.

GERTRUDE: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

HORATIO: You might have rhymed.

HAMLET: You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

HAMLET: For some must watch, while some must sleep:
So runs the world away.

HAMLET: 'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.

ROSENCRANTZ: The cess of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it.

CLAUDIUS: In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above.

GERTRUDE: This is the very coinage of your brain.
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in.

HAMLET: I must be cruel, only to be kind.

HAMLET: Let it work.
For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard, and 't shall go hard.

CLAUDIUS: What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?

GERTRUDE: Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend
Which is the mightier.

CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

HAMLET: At supper.

CLAUDIUS: At supper? Where?

HAMLET: Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him.

HAMLET: Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.

CLAUDIUS: Where is Polonius?

HAMLET: In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger find him not there, seek him i' the other place yourself.

HAMLET: How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge!

HAMLET: What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.

HAMLET: How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?

GENTLEMAN: Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they yawn at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts.

GERTRUDE: So full of artless jealousy is guilt,
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.

CLAUDIUS: When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions.

OPHELIA: There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember. And there is pansies; that's for thoughts.

OPHELIA: There's a daisy, I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.

FIRST CLOWN: What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?

SECOND CLOWN: The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.

HAMLET: The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.

HAMLET: Whose grave's this, sirrah?

FIRST CLOWN: Mine, sir.

HAMLET: I think it be thine, indeed; for thou liest in't.

FIRST CLOWN: It was the very day that young Hamlet was born; he that is mad, and sent into England.

HAMLET: Ay, marry, why was he sent into England?

FIRST CLOWN: Why, because he was mad: he shall recover his wits there; or, if he do not, it's no great matter there.

HAMLET: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.

HAMLET: Where be your gibes now? Your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chopfallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that.

GERTRUDE: Sweets to the sweet: farewell!

HAMLET: I prithee, take thy fingers from my throat.

HAMLET: Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.

HAMLET: There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

HAMLET: I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning, but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service.

HAMLET: 'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.

HAMLET: There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

HAMLET: If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.

CLAUDIUS: Give me the cups;
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
The cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth,
"Now the king drinks to Hamlet." Come, begin.

OSRIC: A hit, a very palpable hit.

HAMLET: Had I but time -- as this fell sergeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest -- O, I could tell you --
But let it be.

HAMLET: Horatio, I am dead;
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.

HAMLET: If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

HAMLET: The rest is silence.

HORATIO: Now cracks a noble heart.

HORATIO: Good night sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

FIRST AMBASSADOR: The ears are senseless that should give us hearing,
To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd,
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

HORATIO: And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' reads: all this can I
Truly deliver.

FORTINBRAS: Go bid the soldiers shoot.

ORSINO: If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.

SIR TOBY: I am sure care's an enemy to life.

SIR ANDREW: But I am a great eater of beef and I believe that does harm to my wit.

FESTE: Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.

FESTE: O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear; your true love's coming.

FESTE: What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

SIR TOBY: Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

ORSINO: For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women's are.

VIOLA: I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers too.

MALVOLIO: 'Tis but fortune; all is fortune.

MALVOLIO: (Reading) But be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.

VIOLA: Thy reason, man?

FESTE: Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words; and words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them.

FESTE: Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere.

OLIVIA: The clock upbraids me with the waste of time.

VIOLA: Then westward ho!

OLIVIA: Why, this is very midsummer madness.

FESTE: And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

MALVOLIO: I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!

FESTE: When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

FESTE: A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.

LAFEU: He hath abandoned his physicians, madam; under whose practises he hath persecuted time with hope, and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time.

LAFEU: He was excellent indeed, madam: the king very lately spoke of him admiringly and mourningly: he was skilful enough to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality.

LAFEU: Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead, excessive grief the enemy to the living.

HELENA: Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

COUNTESS: Tell me thy reason why thou wilt marry.

CLOWN: My poor body, madam, requires it: I am driven on by the flesh; and he must needs go that the devil drives.

COUNTESS: Marry, that's a bountiful answer that fits all questions.

Clown: It is like a barber's chair that fits all buttocks, the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brawn buttock, or any buttock.

KING: Strange is it that our bloods,
Of colour, weight, and heat, pour'd all together,
Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off
In differences so mighty.

LAFEU: Fare you well, my lord; and believe this of me, there can be no kernel in this light nut; the soul of this man is his clothes.

HELENA: (Reads) "But in such a 'then' I write a 'never.'" This is a dreadful sentence.

COUNTESS: Grief would have tears, and sorrow bids me speak.

PAROLLES: I love not many words.

SECOND LORD: No more than a fish loves water.

FIRST LORD: The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.

PAROLLES: My lord, I am a man whom fortune hath cruelly scratched.

LAFEU: And what would you have me to do? 'Tis too late to pare her nails now.

KING: Praising what is lost makes the remembrance dear.

KING: Let's take the instant by the forward top;
For we are old, and on our quick'st decrees
The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time
Steals ere we can effect them.

KING: I am wrapp'd in dismal thinkings.

LAFEU: Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon.

ALEXANDER: They say he is a very man per se, and stands alone.

CRESSIDA: So do all men, unless they are drunk, sick, or have no legs.

CRESSIDA: Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is.

ULYSSES: And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.

ULYSSES: They tax our policy, and call it cowardice,
Count wisdom as no member of the war,
Forestall prescience, and esteem no act
But that of hand. The still and mental parts,
That do contrive how many hands shall strike
When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure
Of their observant toil, the enemies' weight--
Why, this hath not a finger's dignity:
They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war;
So that the ram that batters down the wall,
For the great swing and rudeness of his poise,
They place before his hand that made the engine,
Or those that with the fineness of their souls
By reason guide his execution.

TROILUS: Will you with counters sum
The past proportion of his infinite?
And buckle in a waist most fathomless
With spans and inches so diminutive
As fears and reasons? fie, for godly shame!

ULYSSES: The amity that wisdom knits not, folly may easily untie.

PANDARUS: Nay, I'll give my word for her too: our kindred, though they be long ere they are wooed, they are constant being won: they are burs, I can tell you; they'll stick where they are thrown.

CRESSIDA: When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
And blind oblivion swallow'd cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing, yet let memory,
From false to false, among false maids in love,
Upbraid my falsehood!

ULYSSES: Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done.

ULYSSES: Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.

ULYSSES: One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all with one consent praise new-born gawds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted.

THERSITES: A plague of opinion! a man may wear it on both sides, like a leather jerkin.

PARIS: There is no help; the bitter disposition of the time will have it so.

CRESSIDA: Time, force, and death,
Do to this body what extremes you can;
But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth,
Drawing all things to it.

CRESSIDA: The grief is fine, full, perfect, that I taste,
And violenteth in a sense as strong
As that which causeth it.

TROILUS: But something may be done that we will not:
And sometimes we are devils to ourselves.

TROILUS: Whiles others fish with craft for great opinion,
I with great truth catch mere simplicity;
Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns,
With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare.

ACHILLES: 'Tis but early days.

MENELAUS: An odd man, lady? Every man is odd.

ULYSSES: There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.

ULYSSES: O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give accosting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader!

AGAMEMNON: What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks
And formless ruin of oblivion.

HECTOR: O, like a book of sport thou'lt read me o'er;
But there's more in me than thou understand'st.

ACHILLES: Tell me, you heavens, in which part of his body
Shall I destroy him? whether there, or there, or there?
That I may give the local wound a name
And make distinct the very breach whereout
Hector's great spirit flew: answer me, heavens!

ACHILLES: Thou crusty batch of nature, what's the news?

THERSITES: That same Diomed's a false-hearted rogue, a most unjust knave; I will no more trust him when he leers than I will a serpent when he hisses. He will spend his mouth, and promise, like Brabbler the hound; but when he performs, astronomers foretell it: it is prodigious, there will come some change; the sun borrows of the moon, when Diomed keeps his word.

CRESSIDA: Hark, one word in your ear.

CRESSIDA: What error leads must err; O, then conclude
Minds sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude.

IAGO: A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife.

IAGO: I follow him to serve my turn upon him:
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd.

IAGO: Zounds, sir, you are one of those that will not serve God if the devil bid you.

IAGO: I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.

BRABANTIO: Thou art a villain.

IAGO: You are -- a senator.

OTHELLO: Rude am I in my speech,
And little bless'd with the soft phrase of peace.

OTHELLO: She swore, in faith, twas strange, 'twas passing strange,
'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful.

OTHELLO: She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd,
And I loved her that she did pity them.

DUKE OF VENICE: When remedies are past, the griefs are ended
By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended.

DUKE OF VENICE: To mourn a mischief that is past and gone
Is the next way to draw new mischief on.

BRABANTIO: But words are words; I never yet did hear
That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear.

BRABANTIO: Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
She has deceived her father, and may thee.

IAGO: Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry -- why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.

IAGO: There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.

IAGO: For I am nothing, if not critical.

OTHELLO: Once more, well met at Cyprus!

IAGO: But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

IAGO: Reputation is an idle and most false imposition: oft got without merit, and lost without deserving: you have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser.

IAGO: When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows.

IAGO: So will I turn her virtue into pitch,
And out of her own goodness make the net
That shall enmesh them all.

IAGO: How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

CLOWN: O, thereby hangs a tail.

OTHELLO: Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul,
But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again.

OTHELLO: "Think, my lord?" By heaven, thou echo'st me,
As if there were some monster in thy thought
Too hideous to be shown.

IAGO: Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands:
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

IAGO: O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.

IAGO: Poor and content is rich and rich enough.

OTHELLO: To be once in doubt is once to be resolved.

IAGO: Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ.

IAGO: Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons,
Which at the first are scarce found to distaste,
But with a little act upon the blood
Burn like the mines of sulphur.

OTHELLO: O, now, for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!

IAGO: O monstrous world! Take note, take note, O world,
To be direct and honest is not safe.

OTHELLO: No, my heart is turned to
stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand.

DESDEMONA: Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?

EMILIA: The world's a huge thing: it is a great price.
For a small vice.

EMILIA: Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have.

IAGO: It makes us, or it mars us.

OTHELLO: Put out the light, and then put out the light.

EMILIA: 'Twill out, 'twill out! I peace?
No, I will speak as liberal as the north.
Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,
All, all, cry shame against me, yet I'll speak.

IAGO: Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.

OTHELLO: I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.

OTHELLO: Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe.

DUKE: There is a kind of character in thy life,
That to the observer doth thy history
Fully unfold.

DUKE: Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not.

LUCIO: Thou concludest like the sanctimonious pirate, that went to sea with the Ten Commandments, but scraped one out of the table.

LUCIO: Why, how now, Claudio! whence comes this restraint?

CLAUDIO: From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty:
As surfeit is the father of much fast,
So every scope by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die.

DUKE: We have strict statutes and most biting laws.
The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds.

DUKE: Hence shall we see, if power change purpose, what our seemers be.

LUCIO: Our doubts are traitors
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.

ISABELLA: O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

CLAUDIO: The miserable have no other medicine but only hope.

DUKE: Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.

DUKE: There, at the moated grange, resides this dejected Mariana.

DUKE: No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure 'scape; back-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes.

DUKE: There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure; but security enough to make fellowships accurst: much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world.

DUKE: This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news.

DUKE: Shame to him whose cruel striking
Kills for faults of his own liking.

DUKE: O, what may man within him hide,
Though angel on the outward side!

DUKE: Craft against vice I must apply.

DUKE: Put not yourself into amazement how these things should be: all difficulties are but easy when they are known.

POMPEY: Pray, Master Barnardine, awake till you are executed, and sleep afterwards.

DUKE: O, your desert speaks loud; and I should wrong it,
To lock it in the wards of covert bosom,
When it deserves, with characters of brass,
A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time
And razure of oblivion.

DUKE: Laws for all faults,
But faults so countenanced, that the strong statutes
Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop,
As much in mock as mark.

LEAR: Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom: and 'tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age;
Conferring them on younger strengths while we
Unburthen'd crawl toward death.

LEAR: Strive to be interess'd; what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.

CORDELIA: Nothing, my lord.

KING LEAR: Nothing?

CORDELIA: Nothing.

KING LEAR: Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.

LEAR: Come not between the dragon and his wrath.

FRANCE: Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised!
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon:
Be it lawful I take up what's cast away.

REGAN: 'Tis the infirmity of his age: yet he hath ever
but slenderly known himself.

EDMUND: Thou, nature, art my goddess.

EDMUND: Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue?

EDMUND: Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

GLOUCESTER: We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves.

EDMUND: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune -- often the surfeit of our own behavior -- we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.

KENT: I do profess to be no less than I seem; to serve him truly that will put me in trust: to love him that is honest; to converse with him that is wise, and says little; to fear judgment; to fight when I cannot choose; and to eat no fish.

LEAR: Dost thou know me, fellow?

KENT: No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.

LEAR: What's that?

KENT: Authority.

FOOL: Truth's a dog must to kennel.

FOOL: Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest.

LEAR: Dost thou call me fool, boy?

FOOL: All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.

FOOL: Thou wast a pretty fellow when thou hadst no need to care for her frowning; now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing.

LEAR: Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster!

LEAR: How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!

FOOL: The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.

LEAR: Because they are not eight?

FOOL: Yes, indeed: thou wouldst make a good fool.

KENT: Thou whoreson zed! thou unnecessary letter!

EDGAR: My face I'll grime with filth;
Blanket my loins: elf all my hair in knots;
And with presented nakedness out-face
The winds and persecutions of the sky.

FOOL: Fortune, that arrant whore,
Ne'er turns the key to the poor.

FOOL: Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following it: but the great one that goes up the hill, let him draw thee after.

FOOL: When a wise man gives thee better counsel, give me mine again: I would have none but knaves follow it, since a fool gives it.

LEAR: Vengeance! plague! death! confusion!

GONERIL: All's not offence that indiscretion finds
And dotage terms so.

LEAR: You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both.

REGAN: O, sir, to wilful men,
The injuries that they themselves procure
Must be their schoolmasters.

LEAR: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

LEAR: And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!

LEAR: I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription.

LEAR: No, I will be the pattern of all patience;
I will say nothing.

LEAR: I am a man more sinn'd against than sinning.

LEAR: My wits begin to turn.

LEAR: The art of our necessities is strange,
And can make vile things precious.

FOOL: This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time.

LEAR: But where the greater malady is fix'd,
The lesser is scarce felt.

LEAR: O, that way madness lies.

LEAR: Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?

LEAR: O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.

EDGAR: False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey.

LEAR: Is man no more than this? Consider him well.

EDGAR: The prince of darkness is a gentleman.

EDGAR: Child Rowland to the dark tower came.

EDGAR: Purr the cat is gray.

EDGAR: Who alone suffers suffers most i' the mind,
Leaving free things and happy shows behind:
But then the mind much sufferance doth o'er skip,
When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.

GLOUCESTER: I am tied to the stake, and I must stand the course.

EDGAR: The lamentable change is from the best;
The worst returns to laughter.

EDGAR: World, world, O world!
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Life would not yield to age.

GLOUCESTER: Full oft 'tis seen,
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities.

EDGAR: The worst is not, so long as we can say "This is the worst."

GLOUCESTER: As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.

GLOUCESTER: 'Tis the time's plague, when madmen lead the blind.

ALBANY: Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile:
Filths savour but themselves.

GLOUCESTER: Is 't not the king?

LEAR: Ay, every inch a king.

LEAR: But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends'.

LEAR: There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!

GLOUCESTER: O, let me kiss that hand!

LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.

LEAR: There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office.

LEAR: Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furr'd gowns hide all.

LEAR: When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.

LEAR: You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.

LEAR: I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

LEAR: You must bear with me.

LEAR: Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

EDMUND: Know thou this, that men are as the time is.

EDGAR: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.

EDMUND: The wheel is come full circle.

LEAR: Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so
That heaven's vault should crack.

LEAR: Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.

KENT: All's cheerless, dark, and deadly.

LEAR: And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all?

KENT: Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass! He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

EDGAR: He is gone, indeed.

KENT: The wonder is, he hath endured so long.

ANTONY: There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd.

ANTONY: Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.

ANTONY: Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man.

ANTONY: Let's not confound the time with conference harsh:
There's not a minute of our lives should stretch
Without some pleasure now.

CHARMIAN: Is't you, sir, that know things?

SOOTHSAYER: In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read.

CHARMIAN: Well, if you were but an inch of fortune better than I, where would you choose it?

IRAS: Not in my husband's nose.

MESSENGER: The nature of bad news infects the teller.

ANTONY: Who tells me true, though in his tale lie death,
I hear him as he flatter'd.

ANTONY: There's a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it:
What our contempt doth often hurl from us,
We wish it ours again.

CLEOPATRA: Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor,
But was a race of heaven.

LEPIDUS: I must not think there are
Evils enow to darken all his goodness:
His faults in him seem as the spots of heaven,
More fiery by night's blackness.

CLEOPATRA: My salad days,
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,
To say as I said then!

LEPIDUS: 'Tis not a time for private stomaching.

ENOBARBUS: Every time serves for the matter that is then born in't.

LEPIDUS: But small to greater matters must give way.

ENOBARBUS: Not if the small come first.

LEPIDUS: Your speech is passion; but pray you stir no embers up.

ANTONY: Three kings I had newly feasted, and did want
Of what I was i' the morning ...

AGRIPPA: Truths would be tales,
Where now half-tales be truths.

ENOBARBUS: It beggar'd all description.

ENOBARBUS: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.

ENOBARBUS: Other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

MESSENGER: But yet, madam--

CLEOPATRA: I do not like "But yet," it does allay
The good precedence.

CLEOPATRA: "But yet" is as a gaoler to bring forth
Some monstrous malefactor.

CHARMIAN: Good madam, keep yourself within yourself; the man is innocent.

CLEOPATRA: Some innocents 'scape not the thunderbolt.

LEPIDUS: What manner o' thing is your crocodile?

ANTONY: It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth: it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.

ANTONY: Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can
Her heart inform her tongue, -- the swan's-down feather,
That stands upon the swell at full of tide,
And neither way inclines.

OCTAVIUS: I have eyes upon him,
And his affairs come to me on the wind.

SCARUS: We have kiss'd away kingdoms and provinces.

ENOBARBUS: Now he'll outstare the lightning. To be furious,
Is to be frighted out of fear; and in that mood
The dove will peck the estridge.

ENOBARBUS: I see still,
A diminution in our captain's brain
Restores his heart: when valour preys on reason,
It eats the sword it fights with.

OCTAVIUS: The time of universal peace is near.

CLEOPATRA: Wishers were ever fools.

CLEOPATRA: Noblest of men, woo't die?
Hast thou no care of me? shall I abide
In this dull world, which in thy absence is
No better than a sty?

CLEOPATRA: Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make death proud to take us.

DERCETAS: I say, O Caesar, Antony is dead.

OCTAVIUS CAESAR: The breaking of so great a thing should make
A greater crack: the round world
Should have shook lions into civil streets,
And citizens to their dens. The death of Antony
Is not a single doom; in the name lay
A moiety of the world.

IRAS: Finish, good lady; the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark.

CLEOPATRA: Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there,
That kills and pains not?

CLOWN: Truly, I have him: but I would not be the party that should desire you to touch him, for his biting is immortal; those that do die of it do seldom or never recover.

CLEOPATRA: Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me.

OCTAVIUS: But she looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.

FIRST WITCH: When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

SECOND WITCH: When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

WITCHES: Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

SERGEANT: Doubtful it stood;
As two spent swimmers, that do cling together
And choke their art.

FIRST WITCH: "Give me," quoth I:
"Aroint thee, witch!" the rump-fed ronyon cries.

FIRST WITCH: Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.

FIRST WITCH: I'll drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
Weary se'nnights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tost.

WITCHES: The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about:
Thrice to thine and thrice to mine
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace! the charm's wound up.

MACBETH: So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

BANQUO: What are these
So wither'd and so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth,
And yet are on't?

BANQUO: If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favours nor your hate.

BANQUO: The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,
And these are of them. Whither are they vanish'd?

MACBETH: Into the air; and what seem'd corporal melted
As breath into the wind. Would they had stay'd!

BANQUO: Were such things here as we do speak about?
Or have we eaten on the insane root
That takes the reason prisoner?

MACBETH: The thane of Cawdor lives: why do you dress me
In borrow'd robes?

BANQUO: And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence.

MACBETH: Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme.

MACBETH: This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good.

MACBETH: If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature?

MACBETH: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.

MACBETH: If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.

BANQUO: New honors come upon him,
Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould
But with the aid of use.

MACBETH: Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

MACBETH: Give me your favour: my dull brain was wrought
With things forgotten.

MALCOLM: Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.

MALCOLM: He died
As one that had been studied in his death
To throw away the dearest thing he owed,
As 'twere a careless trifle.

DUNCAN: There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.

MACBETH: Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires:

MACBETH: The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

LADY MACBETH: Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.

LADY MACBETH: The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.

LADY MACBETH: Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty!

LADY MACBETH: Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters.

LADY MACBETH: May read strange matters. To beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under't.

MACBETH: If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly.

MACBETH: ... that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here.

MACBETH: But in these cases
We still have judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor.

MACBETH: Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off.

LADY MACBETH: Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire?

MACBETH: I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.

LADY MACBETH: We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail.

LADY MACBETH: Soundly invite him--his two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only ...

LADY MACBETH: When in swinish sleep
Their drenched natures lie as in a death ...

LADY MACBETH: Away, and mock the time with fairest show:
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

BANQUO: There's husbandry in heaven;
Their candles are all out.

BANQUO: A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers,
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose!

MACBETH: Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?

MACBETH: Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

MACBETH: Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.

MACBETH: Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.

MACBETH: Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it.

MACBETH: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

MACBETH: I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

LADY MACBETH: That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold;
What hath quench'd them hath given me fire.

MACBETH: Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep", the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast,--

MACBETH: I am afraid to think what I have done;
Look on't again I dare not.

LADY MACBETH: The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures.

LADY MACBETH: 'Tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil.

MACBETH: Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

LADY MACBETH: A little water clears us of this deed:
How easy is it, then!

PORTER: Who's there, in the other devil's name? Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator.

PORTER: But this place is too cold for hell. I'll devil-porter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.

PORTER: 'Faith sir, we were carousing till the second cock: and drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things.

MACDUFF: What three things does drink especially provoke?

PORTER: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine.

PORTER: Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance: therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.

MACBETH: The labour we delight in physics pain.

LENNOX: The night has been unruly: where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events
New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird
Clamour'd the livelong night: some say, the earth
Was feverous and did shake.

MACBETH: 'Twas a rough night.

MACBETH: Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for, from this instant,
There 's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.

DONALBAIN: Where we are,
There's daggers in men's smiles: the nea'er in blood,
The nearer bloody.

ROSS: By the clock, 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.

ROSS: Is't night's predominance, or the day's shame,
That darkness does the face of earth entomb,
When living light should kiss it?

OLD MAN: 'Tis unnatural,
Even like the deed that's done. On Tuesday last,
A falcon, towering in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd.

ROSS: And Duncan's horses -- a thing most strange and certain --
Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make
War with mankind.

OLD MAN: 'Tis said they eat each other.

OLD MAN: God's benison go with you; and with those
That would make good of bad, and friends of foes!

BANQUO: Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all,
As the weird women promised, and, I fear,
Thou play'dst most foully for't.

FIRST MURDERER: We are men, my liege.

MACBETH: Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept
All by the name of dogs: the valued file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous nature
Hath in him closed; whereby he does receive
Particular addition from the bill
That writes them all alike: and so of men.

SECOND MURDERER: I am one, my liege,
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Have so incensed that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world.

LADY MACBETH: Naught's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content:

LADY MACBETH: 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

LADY MACBETH: Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what's done is done.

MACBETH: We have scorched the snake, not killed it:
She'll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice
Remains in danger of her former tooth.

MACBETH: Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.

MACBETH: O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!

MACBETH: Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood:
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;
While night's black agents to their preys do rouse.

MACBETH: I had else been perfect,
Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,
As broad and general as the casing air:
But now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confined, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears.

MACBETH: There the grown serpent lies; the worm that's fled
Hath nature that in time will venom breed,
No teeth for the present.

LADY MACBETH: To feed were best at home;
From thence the sauce to meat is ceremony;
Meeting were bare without it.

LADY MACBETH: Now, good digestion wait on appetite,
And health on both!

MACBETH: The time has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools. This is more strange
Than such a murder is.

MACBETH: Do not muse at me, my most worthy friends,
I have a strange infirmity, which is nothing
To those that know me.

MACBETH: Can such things be,
And overcome us like a summer's cloud,
Without our special wonder?

MACBETH: It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak.

MACBETH: Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

LADY MACBETH: You lack the season of all natures, sleep.

FIRST WITCH: Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.

WITCHES: Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

SECOND WITCH: Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and owlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

SECOND WITCH: By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.

MACBETH: How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!

SECOND WITCH: Open, locks,
Whoever knocks!

SECOND APPARITION: Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.

THIRD APPARITION: Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.

MACBETH: Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root?

MACBETH: From this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand.

LADY MACDUFF: When our actions do not,
Our fears do make us traitors.

SON: And must they all be hanged that swear and lie?

LADY MACDUFF: Every one.

SON: Who must hang them?

LADY MACDUFF: Why, the honest men.

SON: Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them.

LADY MACDUFF: But I remember now
I am in this earthly world; where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.

MALCOLM: Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.

MALCOLM: I think our country sinks beneath the yoke;
It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds.

MALCOLM: Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.

MALCOLM: Dispute it like a man.

MACDUFF: I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man.

LADY MACBETH: Out, damned spot! out, I say!

LADY MACBETH: Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

LADY MACBETH: The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now? -- What, will these hands ne'er be clean?

LADY MACBETH: Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O!

MACBETH: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR: Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

MACBETH: Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it.

MACBETH: I have almost forgot the taste of fears;
The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in't.

MACBETH: I have supp'd full with horrors.

SEYTON: The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH: She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.

MACBETH: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

MACBETH: Ring the alarum-bell! Blow wind, come wrack,
At least we'll die with harness on our back.

MACDUFF: I bear a charmed life, which must not yield,
To one of woman born.

MACDUFF: Despair thy charm;
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripp'd.

MACBETH: Lay on, Macduff,
And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'

MACDUFF: The time is free.

ANTIOCHUS: Nature this dowry gave, to glad her presence,
The senate-house of planets all did sit,
To knit in her their best perfections.

PERICLES: See where she comes, apparell'd like the spring.

PERICLES: For death remember'd should be like a mirror,
Who tells us life's but breath, to trust it error.

PERICLES: Few love to hear the sins they love to act.

PERICLES: Kings are earth's gods; in vice their law's their will;
And if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill?

PERICLES: Murder's as near to lust as flame to smoke.

CLEON: My Dionyza, shall we rest us here,
And by relating tales of others' griefs,
See if 'twill teach us to forget our own?

GOWER: I'll show you those in troubles reign,
Losing a mite, a mountain gain.

THIRD FISHERMAN: Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.

FIRST FISHERMAN: Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the
little ones.

PERICLES: How from the finny subject of the sea
These fishers tell the infirmities of men;
And from their watery empire recollect
All that may men approve or men detect!

PERICLES: A man whom both the waters and the wind,
In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball
For them to play upon, entreats you pity him.

PERICLES: Whereby I see that Time's the king of men,
He's both their parent, and he is their grave,
And gives them what he will, not what they crave.

GOWER: The cat, with eyne of burning coal,
Now crouches fore the mouse's hole.

MARINA: This world to me is like a lasting storm,
Whirring me from my friends.

DIONYZA: Nurses are not the fates;
To foster is not ever to preserve.

GOWER: By you being pardon'd, we commit no crime
To use one language in each several clime
Where our scenes seem to live.

GOWER: No visor does become black villany
So well as soft and tender flattery.

POET: I have not seen you long: how goes the world?

PAINTER: It wears, sir, as it grows.

APEMANTUS: That there should be small love 'mongst these sweet knaves,
And all this courtesy!

SECOND LORD: Thou art going to Lord Timon's feast?

APEMANTUS: Ay, to see meat fill knaves and wine heat fools.

TIMON: Ceremony was but devised at first
To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes,
Recanting goodness, sorry ere 'tis shown;
But where there is true friendship, there needs none.

APEMANTUS: Immortal gods, I crave no pelf;
I pray for no man but myself:
Grant I may never prove so fond,
To trust man on his oath or bond;
Or a harlot, for her weeping;
Or a dog, that seems a-sleeping:
Or a keeper with my freedom;
Or my friends, if I should need 'em.
Amen.

APEMANTUS: Hoy-day, what a sweep of vanity comes this way!

APEMANTUS: Who lives that's not depraved or depraves?

FLAVIUS: He commands us to provide, and give great gifts,
And all out of an empty coffer:
Nor will he know his purse, or yield me this,
To show him what a beggar his heart is,
Being of no power to make his wishes good.

FLAVIUS: His promises fly so beyond his state
That what he speaks is all in debt; he owes
For every word.

FLAVIUS: I bleed inwardly for my lord.

SENATOR: I love and honour him,
But must not break my back to heal his finger.

FLAVIUS: No care, no stop! so senseless of expense,
That he will neither know how to maintain it,
Nor cease his flow of riot: takes no account
How things go from him, nor resumes no care
Of what is to continue.

FLAVIUS: The future comes apace. What shall defend the interim?

FLAVIUS: O my good lord, the world is but a word:
Were it all yours to give it in a breath,
How quickly were it gone!

FLAVIUS: They answer, in a joint and corporate voice,
That now they are at fall, want treasure, cannot
Do what they would; are sorry -- you are honourable, --
But yet they could have wish'd -- they know not --
Something hath been amiss -- a noble nature
May catch a wrench -- would all were well -- 'tis pity; --
And so, intending other serious matters,
After distasteful looks and these hard fractions,
With certain half-caps and cold-moving nods
They froze me into silence.

FIRST STRANGER: Men must learn now with pity to dispense;
For policy sits above conscience.

ALCIBIADES: I have kept back their foes,
While they have told their money and let out
Their coin upon large interest, I myself
Rich only in large hurts. All those for this?

TIMON: Let no assembly of twenty be without a score of villains.

APEMANTUS: The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts.

TIMON: Go, live rich and happy;
But thus conditioned: thou shalt build from men;
Hate all, curse all, show charity to none,
But let the famished flesh slide from the bone,
Ere thou relieve the beggar. Give to dogs
What thou deny'st to men. Let prisons swallow 'em,
Debts wither 'em to nothing; be men like blasted woods,
And may diseases lick up their false bloods!
And so farewell and thrive.

MARCIUS: What would you have, you curs, that like nor peace nor war? The one affrights you, the other makes you proud.

MARCIUS: He that trusts to you, where he should find you lions, finds you hares; where foxes, geese: you are no surer, no, than is the coal of fire upon the ice, or hailstone in the sun.

MARCIUS: With every minute you do change a mind,
And call him noble that was now your hate,
Him vile that was your garland.

VALERIA: O' my word, the father's son! I'll swear, 'tis a very pretty boy. O' my troth, I looked upon him a Wednesday half an hour together; has such a confirmed countenance! I saw him run after a gilded butterfly; and when he caught it, he let it go again, and after it again, and over and over he comes, and again, catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or how 'twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it. O, I warrant, how he mammocked it!

VOLUMNIA: One on 's father's moods.

VALERIA: Indeed, la, 'tis a noble child.

BRUTUS: We do it not alone, sir.

MENENIUS: I know you can do very little alone; for your helps are many, or else your actions would grow wondrous single: your abilities are too infant-like for doing much alone.

FIRST OFFICER: If he did not care whether he had their love or no, he waved indifferently 'twixt doing them neither good nor harm: but he seeks their hate with greater devotion than can render it him; and leaves nothing undone that may fully discover him their opposite. Now, to seem to affect the malice and displeasure of the people is as bad as that which he dislikes, to flatter them for their love.

CORIOLANUS: Yet oft, when blows have made me stay, I fled from words.

CORIOLANUS: Bid them wash their faces and keep their teeth clean.

CORIOLANUS: And mountainous error be too highly heap'd for truth to o'erpeer.

BRUTUS: Get you hence instantly, and tell those friends,
They have chose a consul that will from them take
Their liberties, make them of no more voice
Than dogs that are as often beat for barking
As therefore kept to do so.

COMINIUS: But now 'tis odds beyond arithmetic.

SECOND PATRICIAN: I would they were abed!

MENENIUS: I would they were in Tiber!

MENENIUS: The service of the foot
Being once gangrened, is not then respected
For what before it was.

CORIOLANUS: For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere.

VOLUMNIA: Anger's my meat; I sup upon myself, and so shall starve with feeding.

FIRST SERVANT: Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men.

THIRD CITIZEN: That we did, we did for the best; and though we willingly consented to his banishment, yet it was against our will.

COMINIUS: I offer'd to awaken his regard
For's private friends: his answer to me was,
He could not stay to pick them in a pile
Of noisome musty chaff. He said 'twas folly,
For one poor grain or two, to leave unburnt
And still to nose the offence.

MENENIUS: For one poor grain or two!
I am one of those; his mother, wife, his child,
And this brave fellow too, we are the grains.

MENENIUS: He had not dined:
The veins unfill'd, our blood is cold, and then
We pout upon the morning, are unapt
To give or to forgive; but when we have stuff'd
These and these conveyances of our blood
With wine and feeding, we have suppler souls
Than in our priest-like fasts.

MENENIUS: The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes.

MENENIUS: No, in such a case the gods will not be good unto us. When we banished him, we respected not them; and, he returning to break our necks, they respect not us.

AUFIDIUS: At a few drops of women's rheum, which are as cheap as lies, he sold the blood and labour of our great action: therefore shall he die, and I'll renew me in his fall.

CLOTEN: I am glad I was up so late; for that's the reason I was up so early.

CLOTEN: Britain is a world by itself; and we will nothing pay for wearing our own noses.

CLOTEN: If you seek us afterwards in other terms, you shall find us in our salt-water girdle. If you beat us out of it, it is yours; if you fall in the adventure, our crows shall fare the better for you, and there's an end.

PISANIO: What shall I need to draw my sword? the paper
Hath cut her throat already.

PISANIO: No, 'tis slander,
Whose edge is sharper than the sword, whose tongue
Outvenoms all the worms of Nile, whose breath
Rides on the posting winds and doth belie
All corners of the world.

PISANIO: Kings, queens and states,
Maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave
This viperous slander enters.

IMOGEN: I see a man's life is a tedious one.

IMOGEN: Plenty and peace breeds cowards: hardness ever
Of hardiness is mother.

IMOGEN: Stick to your journal course: the breach of custom is breach of all.

IMOGEN: Society is no comfort to one not sociable.

GUIDERIUS: I cannot sing: I'll weep, and word it with thee;
For notes of sorrow out of tune are worse
Than priests and fanes that lie.

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' the great;
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

PISANIO: The heavens still must work.

POSTHUMUS LEONATUS: A book? O rare one!
Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment
Nobler than that it covers!

FIRST JAILER: O, the charity of a penny cord! It sums up thousands in a trice: you have no true debitor and creditor but it; of what's past, is, and to come, the discharge: your neck, sir, is pen, book and counters; so the acquittance follows.

POLIXENES: And therefore, like a cipher,
Yet standing in rich place, I multiply
With one 'We thank you' many thousands more
That go before it.

POLIXENES: We were, fair queen,
Two lads that thought there was no more behind
But such a day tomorrow as today,
And to be boy eternal.

POLIXENES: What we changed
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did.

HERMIONE: Cram's with praise, and make's
As fat as tame things. One good deed dying tongueless
Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.
Our praises are our wages. You may ride's
With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere
With spur we beat an acre.

LEONTES: Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh? -- a note infallible
Of breaking honesty! -- horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

CAMILLO: You may as well
Forbid the sea for to obey the moon
As or by oath remove or counsel shake
The fabric of his folly, whose foundation
Is piled upon his faith and will continue
The standing of his body.

MAMILLIUS: A sad tale's best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins.

LEONTES: There may be in the cup
A spider steep'd, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge
Is not infected: but if one present
The abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.

HERMIONE: The crown and comfort of my life, your favour,
I do give lost; for I do feel it gone,
But know not how it went.

PAULINA: What's gone and what's past help should be past grief.

Exit, pursued by a bear.

SHEPHERD: I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.

TIME: I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings.

PERDITA: For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep
Seeming and savour all the winter long.

POLIXENES: Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean.

PERDITA: Here's flowers for you;
Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram;
The marigold, that goes to bed wi' the sun
And with him rises weeping: these are flowers
Of middle summer, and I think they are given
To men of middle age.

PERDITA: Sure this robe of mine does change my disposition.

CAMILLO: I should leave grazing, were I of your flock,
And only live by gazing.

PERDITA: O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall
From Dis's waggon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bight Phoebus in his strength--a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one.

FLORIZEL: When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that, move still, still so,
And own no other function.

FLORIZEL: Old sir, I know
She prizes not such trifles as these are:
The gifts she looks from me are pack'd and lock'd
Up in my heart; which I have given already,
But not deliver'd.

FLORIZEL: Not for Bohemia, nor the pomp that may
Be thereat glean'd, for all the sun sees or
The close earth wombs or the profound seas hide
In unknown fathoms, will I break my oath
To this my fair beloved.

FLORIZEL: But as the unthought-on accident is guilty
To what we wildly do, so we profess
Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies
Of every wind that blows.

CAMILLO: Prosperity's the very bond of love,
Whose fresh complexion and whose heart together
Affliction alters.

AUTOLYCUS: I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive.

SERVANT: He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes.

AUTOLYCUS: Come buy of me, come; come buy, come buy;
Buy lads, or else your lasses cry: Come buy.

AUTOLYCUS: How blessed are we that are not simple men!

CLEOMENES: Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil;
With them forgive yourself.

SECOND GENTLEMAN: How goes it now, sir? This news which is called true is so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion.

GONZALO: Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any thing. The wills above be done! but I would fain die a dry death.

MIRANDA: If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.

MIRANDA: You have often
Begun to tell me what I am, but stopp'd
And left me to a bootless inquisition,
Concluding 'Stay: not yet.'

PROSPERO: The hour's now come;
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear.

PROSPERO: But how is it
That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?

MIRANDA: Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.

PROSPERO: Me, poor man, my library was dukedom large enough.

PROSPERO: So, of his gentleness,
Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.

PROSPERO: By my prescience
I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop.

ARIEL: All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.

ARIEL: The king's son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring, -- then like reeds, not hair, --
Was the first man that leap'd; cried, 'Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.'

PROSPERO: The time 'twixt six and now must by us both be spent most preciously.

ARIEL: I prithee,
Remember I have done thee worthy service;
Told thee no lies, made thee no mistakings, served
Without or grudge or grumblings: thou didst promise
To bate me a full year.

MIRANDA: The strangeness of your story put heaviness in me.

PROSPERO: Come on; We'll visit Caliban my slave, who never Yields us kind answer.

CALIBAN: As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both!

CALIBAN: When thou camest first,
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night.

PROSPERO: When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes
With words that made them known.

CALIBAN: You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

FERDINAND: This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,
Or it hath drawn me rather.

ARIEL: Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
Hark! now I hear them, -- Ding-dong, bell.

PROSPERO: They are both in either's powers; but this swift business
I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light.