Shakespeare

I shower
A welcome on ye;
Welcome all. – Shakespeare

The Comedy of Errors

“Was there ever any man thus beaten out
of season,
When in the why and the wherefore is neither
rhyme nor reason. – S. Dromio Act II, Scene II

“Who, every word by all my wit being scanned,
Want wit in all one word to understand.” – S. Antipholus Act II, Scene II

“Say what you will, sir, but I know what
I know —
That you beat me at the mart, I have your hand to
show;
If the skin were parchment and the blows you gave
were ink,
Your own handwriting would you what I think.” – E. Dromio Act III, Scene I

“Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast.” – Balthazar Act III, Scene I

“Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak:
Lay open to my earthy – gross conceit,
Smothered in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,
The folded meaning of your word’s deceit.” – S. Antipholus Act III, Scene I

“If everyone knows us and we know none,
Tis time, I think to trudge, pack, and be gone.” – S. Antipholus Act IV, Scene II

King Lear:

“Not being the worst stands in some rank of praise.” – King Lear

Julius Caesar:

“If it be aught toward the general good,
Set honor in one eye and i’th’other,
And I will look on both indifferently:
For let the gods so speed me as I love
The name of honor more than I fear death.” – Brutus

Hamlet:

“Sit down awhile,
And let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story.” – Barnardo Act I, Scene 1

“Our state to be disjoint and out of frame,
Colleagued with the dream of his advantage,
He hath not fail’d to pester us with message,
Importing the surrender of those lands
Lost by his father, with all bonds of law,
To our most valiant brother. So much for him.” – King Claudius Act I, Scene II

“A little more than kin, and less than kind.” – Hamlet Act 1, Scene II

“Hyperion to a satyr” Hamlet Act 1, Scene II

“Season your admiration for awhile
With an attent ear, till I may deliver,
Upon the witness of these gentlemen,
This marvel to you.” – Horatio Act I, Scene II

“My necessaries are embark’d: farewell:
And, sister, as the winds give benefit
And convoy is assistant, do not sleep,
But let me hear from you.” – Laertes Act I, Scene III

“For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.” – Laertes Act 1, Scene III

“Virtue itself ‘scapes not calumnious strokes:” – Laertes Act 1, Scene III

“The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,” – Lord Polonius Act 1, Scene III

“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.” – Lord Polonius Act 1, Scene III

“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.” – Lord Polonius  Act 1, Scene III

“‘Tis in my memory lock’d,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.” – Ophelia Act 1, Scene III

“Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.” – Ghost  Act 1, Scene V

The time is out of joint, o cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right! – Hamlet Act I Scene V

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” Hamlet Act 1, Scene V

“Brevity is the soul of wit” – Lord Polonius Act II, Scene II

“More matter, with less art.” – Queen Gertrud Act II, Scene II

“Words, words, words.” – Hamlet Act II, Scene II (when asked what he is reading?)

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t.” – Lord Polonius Act II, Scene II

“What a piece of work is a man!” – Hamlet Act II, Scene II

“I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation.” – Rosencrantz Act II, Scene II

By’r lady, your ladyship is
Nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the
Altitude of a chopine.  – Hamlet Act II, Scene II

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
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? 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. 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. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ 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 th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? 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?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.   – Hamlet Act III, Scene I

“Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.” – Ophelia Act III, Scene I

“The observed of all observers.” – Ophelia Act III, Scene 1

“To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!” – Ophelia Act III, Scene I

“Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special observance,
that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: 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 own feature, scorn her own image, and the very
age and body of the time his form and pressure.”   – Hamlet Act III, Scene II

“Now
this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the
unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the
censure of the which one must in your allowance
o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.”  – Hamlet Act III, Scene II

“Dost thou hear?
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath seal’d thee for herself; for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks: and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. 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 Act III, Scene II

I do believe you think what now you speak;
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity;
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree;
But fall, unshaken, when they mellow be.
Most necessary ’tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt:
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy:
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor ’tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For ’tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
The great man down, you mark his favourite flies;
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies.
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend;
For who not needs shall never lack a friend,
And who in want a hollow friend doth try,
Directly seasons him his enemy.
But, orderly to end where I begun,
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own:
So think thou wilt no second husband wed;
But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead. – Player King Act III, Scene II

Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
So runs the world away.  – Hamlet Act III, Scene II

“you
Do, surely, bar the door upon your own liberty, if
You deny your griefs to your friend.” – Rosencrantz  Act III, Scene II

“They fool
Me to the top of my bent.” – Hamlet Act III, Scene II

“And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect.” – King Claudius Act III, Scene III

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” – King Claudius Act III, Scene III

Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite – Hamlet Act III, Scene IV

“A combination and a form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man” – Hamlet Act III, Scene IV

Refrain to-night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence: the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature – Hamlet Act III, Scene IV

“I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.” – Hamlet Act III, Scene IV

“Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me.” – Queen Gertrude Act III, Scene IV

“Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection. They aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” – Queen Gertrude Act IV, Scene V

‘Twere good she were spoken with; for she may strew
Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds. – Horatio Act IV, Scene V

So full of artless jealousy is guilt,
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt. – Queen Gertrude Act IV, Scene V

Lord, we know what we are, but know not
What we may be. – Ophelia Act IV, Scene V

Why to a public count I might not go,
Is the great love the general gender bear him;
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gyves to graces; so that my arrows,
Too slightly timber’d for so loud a wind,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aim’d them. – King Claudius Act IV, Scene VII

But that I know love is begun by time;
And that I see, in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it;
And nothing is at a like goodness still;
For goodness, growing to a plurisy,
Dies in his own too much: that we would do
We should do when we would; for this ‘would’ changes
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing. – King Claudius Act IV, Scene VII

One woe doth tread upon another’s heel,
So fast they follow; – Queen Gertrude Act IV, Scene VII

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw! – Hamlet – Act V, Scene I

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting,
That would not let me sleep: methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly,
And praised be rashness for it, let us know,
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will,–  Hamlet Act V, Scene II

For, by the image of my cause, I see
The portraiture of his: I’ll court his favours. – Hamlet Act V, Scene II

His purse is empty already; all’s golden words are spent. – Hamlet Act V, Scene II

I dare not confess that, lest I should compare with
Him in excellence; but, to know a man well, were to
Know himself. – Hamlet Act V, Scene II

Not a whit, we defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. 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: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. – Hamlet Act V, Scene II

the rest is silence. – Hamlet Act V, Scene II

This quarry cries on havoc – Prince Fortinbras

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! – Horatio Act V, Scene II

To tell my story – Hamlet Act V, Scene II

Vonnegut on Hamlet:

“There’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”

Macbeth:

“Come what come may
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.” – Macbeth Act I, Scene III

“There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face.” Duncan Act I, Scene IV

“Only I have left to say
More is thy due than more than all can pay.” – King Duncan

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: – Macbeth Act V, Scene V