“Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.”
“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
“The prince of darkness is a gentleman!”
“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”
“The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”
“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”
“Many a true word hath been spoken in jest.”
“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: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star.”
“And worse I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.”
“No, no, no, no! 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.”
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our teeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!”
“I am a man more sinned against than sinning”
“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
“O, let me kiss that hand!
KING LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.”
“A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.”
“Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all.”
“This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.”
“When we our betters see bearing our woes,
We scarcely think our miseries our foes.”
“Mark it, nuncle.
Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest,
Leave thy drink and thy whore
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.”
“In jest, there is truth.”
“Love’s not love
When it is mingled with regards that stand
Aloof from th’ entire point.”
“When the
mind’s free,
The Body’s delicate.”
“Nothing can come of nothing.”
“O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!”
“I have no way and therefore want no eyes
I stumbled when I saw. Full oft ’tis seen
our means secure us, and our mere defects
prove our commodities.”
“More fools know Jack Fool than Jack Fool knows.”
“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.”
“I am a man, More sinn’d against than sinning.”
