Quotations by Shakespeare, William
Fellowship in woe doth woe assuage.
Lovers and madmen have seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
LAFEU: Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead, excessive grief the enemy to the living.
COUNTESS: Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
All’s Well that Ends Well, Act 1, sc. 1, l. 73 (1602)
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HELENA: Oft expectation fails and most oft there
Where most it promises, and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.
No legacy is so rich as honesty.
PAROLLES: Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this; for it will come to pass
That every braggart shall be found an ass.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 4, sc. 3 (1602-04)
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The web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so we find profit by losing of our prayers.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2, sc. 2, l. 271 [Enobarbus] (1607)
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To business that we love we rise betime
And go to it with delight.
O, how full of briers is this working-day world!
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
We are true lovers run into strange capers.
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 ….
Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:
The wide and universal theater
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play in.
Kindness, nobler ever than revenge.
I do now remember a saying,
‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man
knows himself to be a fool.’
ORLANDO: O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!
Ingratitude is monstrous.
Action is eloquence.
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.
Society is not comfort
To one not sociable.
Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.
Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.
POLONIUS: This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
HAMLET: Meet it as I should set it down
That one may smile and smile and still be a villain.
HAMLET: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Many wearing rapiers are afraid of goosequills.
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Hamlet, Act 2, sc. 2 [Polonius] (1600)
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In full:
"Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief ...."
HAMLET: Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?
HAMLET: There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
The dread of something after death,
The undiscovr’d country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than to fly to others that we know not of?
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Hamlet, Act 4, sc. 5, l. 83 [Claudius] (1600)
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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.
Season your admiration for a while.
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven
While he the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.
HAMLET: Conscience does make cowards of us all.
We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.
There is a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
The better part of valour is discretion.
God befriend us as our cause is just.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, sc. 1, l. 121 [Henry] (1597)
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If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work.
Wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it.
Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!
O thoughts of men accursed!
Past and to come seems best; things present worst.
Are these things then necessities Then let us meet them like necessities.
Ignorance is the curse of God.
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: 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.
KING HENRY: Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin
As self-neglecting.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Henry V, Act 2, sc. 4, l. 75 [Dauphin] (1598)
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Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
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, summon up the blood.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Henry V, Act 3, sc. 1 [Henry] (1599)
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I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot;
Follow your spirit: and upon this charge,
Cry — God for Harry! England and Saint George!William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Henry V, Act 3, sc. 1 [Henry] (1599)
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I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Henry V, Act 3, sc. 2 [Boy] (1599)
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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?
Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Henry V, Act 4, sc. 1 [King Henry] (1599)
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There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out.
O, do not wish one more!
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.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Henry V, Act 4, sc. 3 [Henry] (1599)
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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, —
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 accurs’d, they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap, whiles any speaks,
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Henry V, Act 4, sc. 3 [Henry] (1599)
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We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
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.
The strawberry grows underneath the nettle.
There is occasions and causes why and wherefore in all things.
Now ’tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted;
Suffer them now, and they’ll o’ergrow the garden.
KING HENRY: Thrice is he arm’d that hath his quarrel just.
Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.
Now join your hands, and with your hands your hearts.
GLOUCESTER: Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind;
The thief doth fear each bush an officer.
KING HENRY: Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself.
Out with it boldly; truth loves open dealing.
‘Tis a kind of good deed to say well,
Yet words are not deeds.
BRUTUS: When love begins to sicken and decay,
It useth an enforced ceremony.
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.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
CAESAR: Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights:
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Julius Caesar, Act 1, sc. 2, l. 192 (1599)
See Plutarch.
BRUTUS: The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power.
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
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.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Julius Caesar, Act 2, sc. 2, l. 34ff [Caesar] (1599)
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The initial phrase has seemingly morphed in the retelling, though still being cited to Shakespeare: "A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once." This is the form most often seen, but is not Shakespeare.
In A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway gives another paraphrase: "The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
This was the most unkindest cut of all.
ANTONY: The evil men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
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.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
CASSIUS: Men at some times are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
O, that a man might know
The end of this day’s business ere it come!
CLARENCE: A little fire is quickly trodden out,
Which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench.
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.
Courage mounteth with occasion.
And oftentimes excusing of a fault,
Doth make the fault worse by the excuse.
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: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!
FOOL: Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest.
ALBANY: Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.
Childe Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still “Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.”
ALBANY: Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.
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, pander, 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.
The worst is not
So long as we can say, “This is the worst.”
Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile.
Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hide all.
Jesters do oft prove prophets.
Men are as the time is.
A light heart lives long.
PORTER: 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.
MACBETH: 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.
Drink, Sir, is a great provoker. […] Lechery, Sir, it provokes, and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.
LADY MACBETH: Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world; where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.
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.
Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what’s done is done.