Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.

Shakespeare

Me, poor man, my library was dukedom large enough.Tempest, i. 1.

Sleep seldom visits sorrow; when it doth, / It is a comforter.Tempest, i. 1.

Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me / From mine own library with volumes that / I prize above my dukedom.Tempest, i. 2.

You rub the sore, when you should bring the plaster.Tempest, ii. 1.

A strange fish.Tempest, ii. 2.

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.Tempest, ii. 2.

When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.Tempest, ii. 2.

Do not, for one repulse, forego the purpose / That you resolv’d to effect.Tempest, iii. 2.

He that dies, pays all debts.Tempest, iii. 2.

This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing.Tempest, iii. 2.

Repentance is heart’s sorrow, and a clear life ensuing.Tempest, iii. 3.

We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.Tempest, iii. 3.

Do not give dalliance / Too much the rein; the strongest oaths are straw / To the fire i’ the blood. Be more abstemious, / Or else good night your vow.Tempest, iv. 1.

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all that it inherit, shall dissolve; / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.Tempest, iv. 1.

The strongest oaths are straw / To the fire i’ the blood.Tempest, iv. 1.

Let us not burden our remembrances with / A heaviness that’s gone.Tempest, v. 1.

Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.Two Gent. of Verona, i. 1.

Wherefore waste I time to counsel thee / That art a votary to fond desire?Two Gent. of Verona, i. 1.

Fie! fie! how wayward is this foolish love, / That like a testy babe will scratch the nurse, / And presently, all humbled, kiss the rod.Two Gent. of Verona, i. 2.

Fire that’s closest kept burns most of all.Two Gent. of Verona, i. 2.

I have no other but a woman’s reason; / I think him so because I think him so.Two Gent. of Verona, i. 2.

They love least that let men know their love.Two Gent. of Verona, i. 2.

Experience is by industry achieved, / And perfected by swift course of time.Two Gent. of Verona, i. 3.

That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man, / If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.Two Gent. of Verona, ii. 1.

Truth hath better deeds than words to grace it.Two Gent. of Verona, ii. 2.

You always end ere you begin.Two Gent. of Verona, ii. 4.

He wants wit that wants resolved will.Two Gent. of Verona, ii. 6.

Unheedful vows may heedfully be broken; / And he wants wit that wants resolvèd will, / To learn his wit to exchange the bad for better.Two Gent. of Verona, ii. 6.

Didst thou but know the inly touch of love, / Thou wouldst as soon go kindle fire with snow, / As seek to quench the fire of love with words.Two Gent. of Verona, ii. 7.

His words are bonds, his oaths are oracles.Two Gent. of Verona, ii. 7.

The current that with gentle murmur glides, / Thou know’st, being stopp’d, impatiently doth rage.Two Gent. of Verona, ii. 7.

Thou would’st as soon go kindle fire with snow, / As seek to quench the fire of love with words.Two Gent. of Verona, ii. 7.

A woman sometimes scorns what best contents her.Two Gent. of Verona, iii. 1.

Cease to lament for that thou canst not help, / And study help for that which thou lament’st.Two Gent. of Verona, iii. 1.

Dumb jewels often, in their silent kind, / More than quick words do move a woman’s mind.Two Gent. of Verona, iii. 1.

Except I be by Silvia in the night, / There is no music in the nightingale.Two Gent. of Verona, iii. 1.

Hope is a lover’s staff; walk hence with that, / And manage it against despairing thoughts.Two Gent. of Verona, iii. 1.

Time is the nurse and breeder of all good.Two Gent. of Verona, iii. 1.

Beauty lives with kindness.Two Gent. of Verona, iv. 2.

Lovers break not hours, / Unless it be to come before their time; / So much they spur their expedition.Two Gent. of Verona, v. 1.

How use doth breed habit in a man!Two Gent. of Verona, v. 4.

O Heaven! were man / But constant, he were perfect; that one error / Fills him with faults; makes him run through all sins.Two Gent. of Verona, v. 4.

Use doth breed a habit in a man.Two Gent. of Verona, v. 4.

Were man / But constant, he were perfect.Two Gent. of Verona, v. 4.

Who by repentance is not satisfied / Is not of heaven, nor earth.Two Gent. of Verona, v. 4.

Who should be trusted when one’s right hand / Is perjured to the bosom?Two Gent. of Verona, v. 4.

Hope is a curtail dog in some affairs.Merry Wives, ii. 1.

Experience, a jewel that I have purchased at an infinite rate.Merry Wives, ii. 2.

If money go before, all ways do lie open.Merry Wives, ii. 2.

Love like a shadow flies when substance love pursues; / Pursuing that that flies, and flying what pursues.Merry Wives, ii. 2.

Why, then, the world’s mine oyster, / Which I with sword will open.Merry Wives, ii. 2.

Sheathe thy impatience; throw cold water on thy choler.Merry Wives, ii. 3.

Keep a gamester from dice, and a good student from his book.Merry Wives, iii. 1.

O what a world of vile ill-favoured faults / Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a-year!Merry Wives, iii. 4.

I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.Merry Wives, iii. 5.

Good luck lies in odd numbers.Merry Wives, v. 1.

Life is a shuttle.Merry Wives, v. 1.

What cannot be eschew’d must be embraced.Merry Wives, v. 4.

As poor as Job.Merry Wives, v. 5.

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.Meas. for Meas., i. 1.

Spirits are not finely touch’d / But to fine issues, nor Nature never lends / The smallest scruple of her excellence / But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines / Herself the glory of a creditor, / Both thanks and use.Meas. for Meas., i. 1.

When maidens sue, / Men give like gods.Meas. for Meas., i. 1.

Good counsellors lack no clients.Meas. for Meas., i. 2.

Our decrees / Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; / And liberty plucks justice by the nose, / The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart / Goes all decorum.Meas. for Meas., i. 4.

Our doubts are traitors, / And make us lose the good we oft might win / By fearing to attempt.Meas. for Meas., i. 5.

Mercy is not itself, that oft looks so; / Pardon is still the nurse of second woe.Meas. for Meas., ii. 1.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall: / Some run from brakes of vice and answer none, / And some condemned for a fault alone.Meas. for Meas., ii. 1.

We must not make a scarecrow of the law.Meas. for Meas., ii. 1.

“Show some pity?” “I show it most of all when I show justice.”Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

But man, proud man, / Drest in a little brief authority, / Most ignorant of what he’s most assured, / His glassy essence,—like an angry ape, / Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven / As make the angels weep.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it! / Why, every fault’s condemned ere it be done.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

Could great men thunder / As Jove himself does, Jove would ne’er be quiet; / For every pelting, petty officer / Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

Go to your bosom; / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault; if it confess / A natural guiltiness, such as his is, / Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue / Against my brother’s life.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

Great men may jest with saints; ’tis wit in them, / But in the less, foul profanation.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

Having waste ground enough, / Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary / And pitch our evils there?Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

It is excellent / To have a giant’s strength, but tyrannous, / To use it like a giant.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

Man, proud man, / Dress’d in a little brief authority; / Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d, / His glassy essence, like an angry ape, / Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, / As make the angels weep.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

Most dangerous / Is that temptation that doth goad us on / To sin in loving virtue.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

No ceremony that to great one ’longs, / Not the king’s crown, nor the deputed sword, / The marshal’s truncheon nor the judge’s robe, / Become them with one half so good a grace / As mercy does.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, / With saints dost bait thy hook.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

Oh, it is excellent / To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

That in the captain’s but a choleric word, / Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once; / And He that might the vantage best have took / Found out the remedy. How would you be / If He, which is the top of judgment, should / But judge you as you are?Meas. for Meas., ii. 2.

Sorrow is always toward ourselves, not heaven; / Showing, we would not spare heaven, as we love it, / But as we stand in fear.Meas. for Meas., ii. 3.

Coin heaven’s image / In stamps that are forbid.Meas. for Meas., ii. 4.

It oft falls out to have what we would have; we speak not what we mean.Meas. for Meas., ii. 4.

Our compell’d sins / Stand more for number than accompt.Meas. for Meas., ii. 4.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; / To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

Death is a fearful thing.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get, / And what thou hast, forgetst.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

Happy thou art not; / For what thou hast not still thou striv’st to get, / And what thou hast, forgett’st.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

If I do lose thee (life), I do lose a thing / That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art, / Servile to all the skyey influences, / That do this habitation, where thou keep’st, / Hourly inflict.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

If I must die, / I will encounter darkness as a bride / And hug it in my arms.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

If thou art rich, thou art poor; / For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, / Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey, / And death unloads thee.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

The Hand that hath made you fair hath made you good; the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, should keep the body of it ever fair.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

The miserable have no other medicine, / But only hope.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

The sense of death is most in apprehension, / And the poor beetle that we tread upon / In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

The weariest and most loathed worldly life, / That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature, is a paradise / To what we fear of death.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey, / And death unloads thee.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

He who the sword of Heaven will bear / Should be as holy as severe.Meas. for Meas., iii. 2.

No might nor greatness in mortality / Can censure ’scape; back-wounding calumny / The whitest virtue strikes.Meas. for Meas., iii. 2.

Novelty is only in request; and it is as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course, as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking.Meas. for Meas., iii. 2.

There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships accursed.Meas. for Meas., iii. 2.

Music oft hath such a charm / To make bad good, and good provoke to harm.Meas. for Meas., iv. 1.

O place and greatness, millions of false eyes / Are stuck upon thee! Volumes of report / Run with these false and most contrarious quests / Upon thy doings! thousand scapes of wit / Make thee the father of their idle dreams, / And rack thee in their fancies.Meas. for Meas., iv. 1.

Our corn’s to reap, for yet our tilth’s to sow.Meas. for Meas., iv. 1.

Every true man’s apparel fits your thief.Meas. for Meas., iv. 2.

When once our grace we have forgot, / Nothing goes right; we would, and we would not.Meas. for Meas., iv. 4.

’Tis a physic that’s bitter to sweet end.Meas. for Meas., iv. 6.

’Gainst the tooth of time / And rasure of oblivion.Meas. for Meas., v. 1.

Best men are moulded out of faults.Meas. for Meas., v. 1.

Keep me in patience; and, with ripened time, / Unfold the evil which is here wrapt up / In countenance.Meas. for Meas., v. 1.

Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure.Meas. for Meas., v. 1.

They say best men are moulded out of faults, / And, for the most, become much more the better / For being a little bad.Meas. for Meas., v. 1.

Tooth of time.Meas. for Meas., v. 1.

Truth is truth to the end of reckoning.Meas. for Meas., v. 1.

A wretched soul, bruised with adversity, / We bid be quiet when we hear it cry; / But were we burdened with like weight of pain, / As much, or more, we should ourselves complain.Comedy of Errors, ii. 1.

Headstrong liberty is lashed with woe.Comedy of Errors, ii. 1.

Patience, unmoved, no marvel though she pause; / They can be meek that have no other cause.Comedy of Errors, ii. 1.

There’s nothing situate under heaven’s eye, / But hath its bound in earth, in sea, in sky.Comedy of Errors, ii. 1.

Every why hath a wherefore.Comedy of Errors, ii. 2.

For slander lives upon successión, / For ever housed where it gets possessión.Comedy of Errors, iii. 1.

Slander lives upon succession; / For ever housed, where it once gets possession.Comedy of Errors, iii. 1.

Small cheer and great welcome make a merry feast.Comedy of Errors, iii. 1.

Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence.Much Ado, i. 1.

He is a very valiant trencherman; he hath an excellent stomach.Much Ado, i. 1.

He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat.Much Ado, i. 1.

In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke.Much Ado, i. 1.

What need the bridge much broader than the flood? / The fairest grant is the necessity. / Look, what will serve is fit.Much Ado, i. 1.

’Tis impossible you should take true root, but by the fair weather that you make yourself; it is needful that you frame the season for your own harvest.Much Ado, i. 3.

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.Much Ado, i. 3.

How much better it is to weep at joy than to joy at weeping!Much Ado, i. 4.

As merry as the day is long.Much Ado, ii. 1.

Beauty is a witch, / Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.Much Ado, ii. 1.

Friendship is constant in all other things, / Save in the office and affairs of love; / Therefore, all hearts in love use their own tongues; / Let every eye negotiate for itself, / And trust no agent.Much Ado, ii. 1.

He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man.Much Ado, ii. 1.

I were but little happy if I could say how much.Much Ado, ii. 1.

Let every eye negotiate for itself, and trust no agent.Much Ado, ii. 1.

She speaks poniards, and every word stabs: if her breath were as terrible as her terminations, there were no living with her; she would infect to the north star.Much Ado, ii. 1.

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy; I were but little happy, if I could say how much.Much Ado, ii. 1.

Doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.Much Ado, ii. 3.

Happy are they that hear their detractions, and can put them to mending.Much Ado, ii. 3.

How still the evening is, / As hushed on purpose to grace harmony!Much Ado, ii. 3.

It is the witness still of excellency / To put a strange face on his own perfection.Much Ado, ii. 3.

Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eye, / Misprising what they look on.Much Ado, iii. 1.

Loving goes by haps; some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.Much Ado, iii. 1.

One doth not know / How much an ill word may empoison liking.Much Ado, iii. 1.

Every one can master a grief but he that has it.Much Ado, iii. 2.

He hath a heart as sound as a bell, and his tongue is the clapper; for what his heart thinks his tongue speaks.Much Ado, iii. 2.

Fashion wears out more apparel than the man.Much Ado, iii. 3.

Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is? how giddily he turns about all the hot bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty.Much Ado, iii. 3.

The ewe that will not hear her lamb when it baes, will never answer a calf when it bleats.Much Ado, iii. 3.

The fashion doth wear out more apparel than the man.Much Ado, iii. 3.

When rich villains have need of poor ones, poor ones may make what price they will.Much Ado, iii. 3.

Comparisons are odorous.Much Ado, iii. 5.

For it so falls out, / That what we have we prize not to the worth / While we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost, / Why, then we rack the value.Much Ado, iv. 1.

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.Much Ado, iv. 1.

O what men dare do! what men may do! / What men daily do, not knowing what they do!Much Ado, iv. 1.

Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.Much Ado, iv. 1.

That which we have we prize not to the worth; / But being lacked and lost, why then we rake its value.Much Ado, iv. 1.

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.Much Ado, iv. 1.

For there was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently.Much Ado, v. 1.

Men / Can counsel, and speak comfort to that grief / Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it, / Their counsel turns to passion, which before / Would give preceptial medicine to rage, / Fetter strong madness in a silken thread, / Charm ache with air and agony with words.Much Ado, v. 1.

Patch grief with proverbs.Much Ado, v. 1.

There was never yet philosopher / Who could endure the toothache patiently.Much Ado, v. 1.

What though care killed a cat: thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care.Much Ado, v. 1.

If a man do not erect in this age his tomb ere he dies, he will live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps.Much Ado, v. 2.

There’s not one wise man among twenty that will praise himself.Much Ado, v. 2.

Done to death by slanderous tongues.Much Ado, v. 3.

All delights are vain; but that most vain / Which, with pain purchas’d, doth inherit pain.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.

Fast and loose.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.

Fat paunches make lean pates, and dainty bits / Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.

Light seeking light doth light of light beguile.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.

Small have continued plodders ever won / Save bare authority from others’ books.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.

So study evermore is overshot; / While it doth study to have what it would, / It doth forget to do the thing it should; / And when it hath the thing it hunteth most, / ’Tis won as towns with fire,—so won, so lost.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.

Spite of cormorant devouring Time, / The endeavour of this present breath may buy / That honour which will bate his scythe’s keen edge, / And make us heirs of all eternity.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.

Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun, / That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.

Cupid’s butt-shaft is too hard for Hercules’ club.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 2.

Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 2.

Love is a familiar; love is a devil: there is no evil angel but love. Yet was Samson so tempted, and he had an excellent strength; yet was Solomon so seduced, and he had a very good wit.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 2.

Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye, / Not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongues.Love’s L’s. Lost, ii. 1.

Nothing becomes him ill that he would well.Love’s L’s. Lost, ii. 1.

Short-lived wits do wither as they grow.Love’s L’s. Lost, ii. 1.

A giving hand, though foul, shall have fair praise.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 1.

Glory grows guilty of detested crimes.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 1.

He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 2.

Many can brook the weather that love not the wind.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 2.

Sir, he hath fed of the dainties that are bred in a book.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 2.

A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

Beauty doth varnish age, as if new-born, / And gives the crutch the cradle’s infancy. / O, ’tis the sun that maketh all things shine.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

For where is any author in the world / Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye?Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive: / They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; / They are the books, the arts, the academes, / That show, contain, and nourish all the world; / Else none at all in aught proves excellent.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

It (love) adds a precious seeing to the eye.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

Learning is but an adjunct to ourself, / And, where we are, our learning likewise is.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

Never durst poet touch a pen to write / Until his ink were temper’d with love’s sighs; / O, then his lines would ravish savage ears, / And plant in tyrants mild humility.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

Universal plodding prisons up / The nimble spirits in the arteries, / As motion and long-during action tires / The sinewy vigour of the traveller.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

When love speaks, the voice of all the gods / Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

Where is any author in the world / Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye?Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

Why, universal plodding prisons up / The nimble spirits in the arteries, / As motion and long-during action tires / The sinewy vigour of the traveller.Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.Love’s L’s. Lost, v. 1.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.Love’s L’s. Lost, v. 1.

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it.Love’s L’s. Lost, v. 2.

He is wit’s pedlar, and retails his wares / At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs; / And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know, / Have not the grace to grace it with such show.Love’s L’s. Lost, v. 2.

Love is full of unbefitting strains; / All wanton as a child, skipping and vain; / Formed by the eye, and therefore, like the eye, / Full of strange shapes, of habits, and of forms, / Varying in subjects as the eye doth roll / To every varied object in his glance.Love’s L’s. Lost, v. 2.

Merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks.Love’s L’s. Lost, v. 2.

To wail friends lost / Is not by much so wholesome, profitable, / As to rejoice at friends but newly found.Love’s L’s. Lost, v. 2.

Ah me! for aught that ever I could read… / The course of true love never did run smooth.Mid. N.’s Dream, i. 1.

Ay me! for aught that ever I could read, / Could ever hear by tale or history, / The course of true love never did run smooth.Mid. N.’s Dream, i. 1.

Brief as the lightning in the collied night, / That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, / And ere a man hath power to say, “Behold!” / The jaws of darkness do devour it up.Mid. N.’s Dream, i. 1.

But earthlier happy is the rose distilled, / Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn, / Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.Mid. N.’s Dream, i. 1.

For aught that ever I could read, / Could ever hear by tale or history, / The course of true love never did run smooth.Mid. N.’s Dream, i. 1.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.Mid. N.’s Dream, i. 1.

The course of true love never did run smooth.Mid. N.’s Dream, i. 1.

Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity.Mid. N.’s Dream, i. 1.

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.Mid. N.’s Dream, ii. 1.

Sickness is catching; Oh, were favour so, / Yours would I catch, sweet Hernia, ere I go; / My ear would catch your voice, my eye your eye, / My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody.Mid. N.’s Dream, ii. 1.

Leave you your power to draw, / And I shall have no power to follow you.Mid. N.’s Dream, ii. 2.

My heart is true as steel.Mid. N.’s Dream, ii. 2.

We cannot fight for love, as men may do; / We should be wooed, and were not made to woo.Mid. N.’s Dream, ii. 2.

You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant; / But yet you draw not iron, for my heart / Is true as steel; leave you your power to draw, / And I shall have no power to follow you.Mid. N.’s Dream, ii. 2.

A surfeit of sweetest things.Mid. N.’s Dream, ii. 3.

Surfeit of the sweetest things / The deepest loathing to the stomach brings.Mid. N.’s Dream, ii. 3.

Nature here shows art, / That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart.Mid. N.’s Dream, ii. 8.

If I had wit enough to get out of this wood, I have said enough to serve mine own turn.Mid. N.’s Dream, iii. 1.

Cupid is a knavish lad, / Thus to make poor females mad.Mid. N.’s Dream, iii. 2.

Dark night, that from the eye his function takes, / The ear more quick of apprehension makes.Mid. N.’s Dream, iii. 2.

Sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye.Mid. N.’s Dream, iii. 2.

So we grew together, / Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, / But yet a union in partition; / Two lovely berries moulded on one stem. / So with two seeming bodies, but one heart.Mid. N.’s Dream, iii. 2.

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, / That the rude sea grew civil at her song, / And certain stars shot madly from their spheres / To hear the sea-maid’s music.Mid. N.’s Dream, iii. 2.

His speech was like a tangled chain; / Nothing impaired, but all disordered.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

In the modesty of fearful duty / I read as much as from the rattling tongue / Of saucy and audacious eloquence.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

It is not enough to speak, but to speak true.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

Never anything can be amiss / When simpleness and duty tender it.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

Such tricks hath strong imagination, / That, if it would but apprehend some joy, / It comprehends some bringer of that joy; / Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, / Are of imagination all compact.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

The poet’s eye, in a 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.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

Well roared, lion.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

Wonder on till truth make all things plain.Mid. N.’s Dream, v. 1.

Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing…. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you will seek all day ere you find them; and when you have them, they are not worth the search.Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

I am Sir Oracle, / And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark.Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

I do know of these / That therefore only are reputed wise / For saying nothing.Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; / A stage, where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one.Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

Let me play the fool; / With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come, / And let my liver rather heat with wine / Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time. / Some that will evermore peep through their eyes / And laugh like parrots at a bagpiper; / And other of such vinegar aspect / That they’ll not show their teeth in way of smile, / Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable.Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

Sometimes from her eyes / I did receive fair speechless messages.Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

They lose it (the world) that do buy it with much care.Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

Why should a man, whose blood is warm within, / Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

You have too much respect upon the world; / They lose it that do buy it with much care.Mer. of Ven., i. 1.

For aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.Mer. of Ven., i. 2.

God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man.Mer. of Ven., i. 2.

Holy men at their death have good inspirations.Mer. of Ven., i. 2.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.Mer. of Ven., i. 2.

It is a good divine that follows his own instructions.Mer. of Ven., i. 2.

It is no mean happiness to be seated in the mean.Mer. of Ven., i. 2.

Superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer.Mer. of Ven., i. 2.

The brain may devise laws for the blood; but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree.Mer. of Ven., i. 2.

They are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.Mer. of Ven., i. 2.

When did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend?Mer. of Ven., i. 2.

For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.Mer. of Ven., i. 3.

If I can catch him once upon the hip, / I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.Mer. of Ven., i. 3.

O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!Mer. of Ven., i. 3.

Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.Mer. of Ven., i. 3.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose! / An evil soul producing holy witness / Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, / A goodly apple rotten at the heart.Mer. of Ven., i. 3.

If Hercules and Lichas play at dice / Which is the better man, the greater throw / May turn by fortune from the weaker hand; / So is Alcides beaten by his page.Mer. of Ven., ii. 1.

Mislike me not for my complexion, / The shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun, / To whom I am a neighbour and near bred.Mer. of Ven., ii. 1.

The shadowed livery of the burnished sun.Mer. of Ven., ii. 1.

Give him a present! give him a halter.Mer. of Ven., ii. 2.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.Mer. of Ven., ii. 2.

Drones hive not with me.Mer. of Ven., ii. 5.

All things that are / Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.Mer. of Ven., ii. 6.

Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind!Mer. of Ven., ii. 6.

Love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.Mer. of Ven., ii. 6.

Who riseth from a feast / With that keen appetite that he sits down? / Where is the horse that doth untread again / His tedious measures with the unabated fire / That he did pace them first? All things that are / Are with more spirit chaséd than enjoy’d.Mer. of Ven., ii. 6.

All that glisters is not gold: / Gilded tombs do worms infold.Mer. of Ven., ii. 7.

Men that hazard all / Do it in hope of fair advantages.Mer. of Ven., ii. 7.

Hanging and wiving goes by destiny.Mer. of Ven., ii. 9.

Let none presume / To wear an undeserved dignity.Mer. of Ven., ii. 9.

O that estates, degrees, and offices / Were not derived corruptly, and that clear honour / Were purchased by the merit of the wearer! / How many then would cover that stand bare; / How many be commanded that command; / How much low peasantry would then be glean’d / From the true seed of honour; and how much honour, /’ Pick’d from the chaff and ruin of the times, / To be new-varnish’d.Mer. of Ven., ii. 9.

O these deliberate fools, when they do choose / They have the wisdom by their wit to lose.Mer. of Ven., ii. 9.

Seven times tried that judgment is / That did never choose amiss.Mer. of Ven., ii. 9.

Some there be that shadows kiss, / Such have but a shadow’s bliss.Mer. of Ven., ii. 9.

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 not we revenge?Mer. of Ven., iii. 1.

Let me say amen betimes, lest the devil cross my prayers.Mer. of Ven., iii. 1.

How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false / As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins / The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars! / Who, inward searched, have livers white as milk.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

In religion / What damnéd error but some sober brow / Will bless it and approve it with a text?Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

O love, be moderate, allay thy ecstasy; / In measure rain thy joy; scant this excess; / I feel too much thy blessing! Make it less, / For fear I surfeit.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

O these naughty times / Put bars between the owners and their rights.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

Ornament is but the guilèd shore / To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf / Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word, / The seeming truth which cunning times put on / To entrap the wisest.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

Tell me where is fancy bred, / Or in the heart, or in the head? / How begot, how nourishéd? / It is engender’d in the eyes, / With gazing fed.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

That ugly treason of mistrust.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

The world is still deceived with ornament. / In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, / But, being seasoned with a gracious voice, / Obscures the show of evil? In religion, / What damn&3233;d error but some sober brow / Will bless it and approve it with a text, / Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

There is no vice so simple but assumes / Some mark of virtue in his outward parts.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

Unlesson’d girl, unschool’d, unpractised; / Happy in this, she is not yet so old / But she may learn.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

You that choose not by the view, / Choose as fair, and choose as true.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.

Quarrelling with occasion.Mer. of Ven., iii. 5.

Thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother.Mer. of Ven., iii. 5.

A Daniel come to judgment.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

A second Daniel.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s, / When mercy seasons justice.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

But mercy is above this sceptred sway; / It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, / It is an attribute to God Himself, / And earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

Every offence is not a hate at first.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

He is well paid that is well satisfied.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

I stay here on my bond.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

Mercy is above this sceptred sway, / It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, / It is an attribute to God himself; / And earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

The quality of mercy is not strain’d; / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest; / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. / ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes / The throned monarch better than his crown.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

Though justice be thy plea, consider this— / That in the course of justice none of us / Should see salvation.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

You take my house, when you do take the prop / That doth sustain my house; you take my life / When you do take the means whereby I live.Mer. of Ven., iv. 1.

A substitute shines brightly as a king, until a king be by.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.

How far that little candle throws his beams! / So shines a good deed in a naughty world.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! / Here will we sit and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.

I am never merry when I hear sweet music.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.

Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold; / There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st / But in his motion like an angel sings, / Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.

Nothing is good I see without respect.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.

Nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage, / But music for the time doth change its nature.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.

The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; / The motions of his spirit are dull as night, / And his affections dark as Erebus: / Let no such man be trusted.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.

There’s not the smallest orb which thou be hold’st, / But in his motion like an angel sings, / Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.

How many things by season season’d are / To their right praise and true perfection!Mer. of Ven., v. i.

The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark / When neither is attended, and I think / The nightingale, if she should sing by day, / When every goose is cackling, would be thought / No better a musician than the wren.Mer. of Ven., v. i.

Fortune reigns in the gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of nature.As You Like It, i. 2.

Only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.As You Like It, i. 2.

The little foolery that wise men have makes a great show.As You Like It, i. 2.

You have deserved / High commendation, true applause and love.As You Like It, i. 2.

Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.As You Like It, i. 3.

How full of briers is this working-day world!As You Like It, i. 3.

O how full of briars is this working-day world.As You Like It, i. 3.

Thought is free.As You Like It, i. 3.

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.As You Like It, ii. 1.

Misery doth part / The flux of company.As You Like It, ii. 1.

Sermons in stones.As You Like It, ii. 1.

Sweet are the uses of adversity, / Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; / And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.As You Like It, ii. 1.

From lowest place where virtuous things proceed, / The place is dignified by the doer’s deed.As You Like It, ii. 3.

He that doth the ravens feed, / Yea, providently caters for the sparrow, / Be comfort to my age.As You Like It, ii. 3.

O what a world is this, when what is comely / Envenoms him that bears it!As You Like It, ii. 3.

Searching of thy wound, I have by hard adventure found my own.As You Like It, ii. 4.

A soldier, / Seeking the bubble reputation / Even in the cannon’s mouth.As You Like It, ii. 7.

All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players.As You Like It, ii. 7.

And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, / And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot, / And thereby hangs a tale.As You Like it, ii. 7.

Blow, blow, thou winter wind, / Thou art not so unkind / As man’s ingratitude.As You Like It, ii. 7.

Full of wise saws and modern instances.As You Like It, ii. 7.

How the world wags!As You Like It, ii. 7.

If ladies be but young and fair, / They have the gift to know it.As You Like It, ii. 7.

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, / Seeking the bubble reputation / Even in the cannon’s mouth.As You Like It, ii. 7.

Last scene of all,… / Is second childishness and mere oblivion; / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.As You Like It, ii. 7.

Manhood, when verging into age, grows thoughtful, / Full of wise saws and modern instances.As You Like It, ii. 7.

Motley’s the only wear.As You Like It, ii. 7.

Seeking the bubble reputation, / Even in the cannon’s mouth.As You Like It, ii. 7.

The infant, / Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. / And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school.As You Like It, ii. 7.

The justice, / In fair round belly with good capon lined, / With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, / Full of wise saws and modern instances; / And so he plays his part.As You Like It, ii. 7.

The lean and slippered 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 towards childish treble, pipes / And whistles in his sound.As You Like It, ii. 7.

The lover, / Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.As You Like It, ii. 7.

The thorny point / Of bare distress hath ta’en from me the show / Of smooth civility.As You Like It, ii. 7.

Thereby hangs a tale.As You Like It, ii. 7.

Weed your better judgments / Of all opinion that grows rank in them.As You Like It, ii. 7.

Every one fault seeming monstrous till his fellow-fault came to match it.As You Like It, iii. 2.

Good pastures make fat sheep.As You Like It, iii. 2.

He that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends.As You Like It, iii. 2.

I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness; glad of other men’s good, content with my harm.As You Like It, iii. 2.

I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults.As You Like It, iii. 2.

Love is merely a madness.As You Like It, iii. 2.

With bag and baggage.As You Like It, iii. 2.

His kissing is as full of sanctity as the touch of holy bread.As You Like It, iii. 4.

Faster than his tongue / Did make offence, his eye did heal it up.As You Like It, iii. 5.

What care I for words? yet words do well / When he that speaks them pleases those that hear.As You Like It, iii. 5.

For ever and a day.As You Like It, iv. 1.

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.As You Like It, iv. 1.

Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.As You Like It, iv. 1.

Make doors fast upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and ’twill out at the keyhole.As You Like It, iv. 1.

Men are April when they woo, December when they wed.As You Like It, iv. 1.

Time is the old justice that examines all offenders.As You Like It, iv. 1.

Too much of a good thing.As You Like It, iv. 1.

You shall never take a woman without her answer, unless you take her without her tongue.As You Like It, iv. 1.

That that is, is.As You Like It, iv. 2.

Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy.As You Like It, iv. 3.

Kindness, nobler ever than revenge.As You Like It, iv. 3.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.As You Like It, v. 1.

Good shepherd, tell this youth what ’tis to love…. It is to be all made of sighs and tears…. It is to be all made of faith and service…. It is to be all made of fantasy, / All made of passion, and all made of wishes; / All adoration, duty, and observance; / All humbleness, all patience, and impatience; / All purity, all trial, all observance.As You Like It, v. 2.

How bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!As You Like It, v. 2.

“If” is the only peacemaker—much virtue in “if.”As You Like It, v. 4.

Your “if” is the only peacemaker; much virtue in “if.”As You Like It, v. 4.

Dost thou love pictures? We will fetch thee straight / Adonis painted by a running brook; / And Cytherea all in sedges hid; / Which seem to move and wanton with her breath; / Even as the waving sedges play with wind.Tam. of Shrew, Ind. 2.

Frame your mind to mirth and merriment, / Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.Tam. of Shrew, Ind. 2.

No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en: / In brief, sir, study what you most affect.Tam. of Shrew, i. 1.

There’s small choice in rotten apples.Tam. of Shrew, i. 1.

Nothing comes amiss, so money comes withal.Tam. of Shrew, i. 2.

Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.Tam. of Shrew, i. 2.

Why, nothing comes amiss, so money comes withal.Tam. of Shrew, i. 2.

Though little fire grows great with little wind, / Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all.Tam. of Shrew, ii. 1.

Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.Tam. of Shrew, iv. 2.

’Tis the mind that makes the body rich; / And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, / So honour peereth in the meanest habit.Tam. of Shrew, iv. 3.

As the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, / So honour peereth in the meanest habit.Tam. of Shrew, iv. 3.

For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich: / And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, / So honour peereth in the meanest habit.Tam. of Shrew, iv. 3.

Is the jay more precious than the lark because his feathers are more beautiful?Tam. of Shrew, iv. 3.

Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor.Tam. of Shrew, iv. 3.

Such war of white and red within her cheeks.Tam. of Shrew, iv. 5.

A woman moved is like a fountain troubled, / Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.Tam. of Shrew, v. 2.

Be checked for silence, / But never tax’d for speech.All’s Well, i. 1.

Love all, trust a few, / Do wrong to none; be able for thine enemy / Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend / Under thy own life’s key; be checked for silence, / But never tax’d for speech.All’s Well, i. 1.

Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead, excessive grief the enemy to the living.All’s Well, i. 1.

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven.All’s Well, i. 1.

The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love.All’s Well, i. 1.

We wound our modesty and make foul the clearness of our deservings when of ourselves we publish them.All’s Well, i. 3.

See that you come not to woo honour, but to wed it.All’s Well, ii. 1.

Things may serve long, but not serve ever.All’s Well, ii. 2.

We make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.All’s Well, ii. 3.

There can be no kernel in this light nut; the soul of this man is in his clothes.All’s Well, ii. 5.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.All’s Well, iii. 5.

Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.All’s Well, iv. 3.

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.All’s Well, iv. 3.

Let’s take the instant by the forward top; / For we are old, and on our quick’st decrees / Th’ inaudible and noiseless foot of time / Steals ere we can effect them.All’s Well, v. 3.

If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.Twelfth Night, i. 1.

So full of shapes is fancy, that it alone is high-fantastical.Twelfth Night, i. 1.

That strain again! It had a dying fall: / Oh, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound / That breathes upon a bank of violets, / Giving and stealing odour!Twelfth Night, i. 1.

Care’s an enemy to life.Twelfth Night, i. 3.

You must confine yourself within the modest limits of order.Twelfth Night, i. 3.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.Twelfth Night, i. 5.

Such as we are made of, such we be.Twelfth Night, ii. 2.

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there are to be no more cakes and ale?Twelfth Night, ii. 3.

Journeys end in lovers’ meeting, / Every wise man’s son doth know.Twelfth Night, ii. 3.

Let still the woman take / An elder than herself; so wears she to him, / So sways she level in her husband’s heart; / 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.Twelfth Night, ii. 4.

Like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.Twelfth Night, ii. 4.

She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud, / Feed on her damask cheek.Twelfth Night, ii. 4.

She pined in thought, / And with a green and yellow melancholy. / She sat like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.Twelfth Night, ii. 4.

Women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once display’d, doth fall that very hour.Twelfth Night, ii. 4.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.Twelfth Night, ii. 5.

I am not what I am.Twelfth Night, iii. 1; Othello, i. 1.

I hate ingratitude more in a man / Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, / Or any taint of vice whose strong corruption / Inhabits our frail blood.Twelfth Night, iii. 1.

Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.Twelfth Night, iii. 1.

In Nature there’s no blemish but the mind; / None can be called deformed but the unkind.Twelfth Night, iii. 4.

Virtue is beauty; but the beauteous-evil / Are empty trunks o’erflourished by the devil.Twelfth Night, iii. 4.

Let thy fair wisdom, not thy passion, sway.Twelfth Night, iv. 1.

There is no darkness but ignorance.Twelfth Night, iv. 2.

Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.Twelfth Night, iv. 2.

The third pays for all.Twelfth Night, v. 1.

One good deed dying tongueless / Slaughters a thousand, waiting upon that.Winter’s Tale, i. 2.

You may ride’s / With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere / With spur we heat an acre.Winter’s Tale, i. 2.

Calumny will sear / Virtue itself: these shrugs, these hums and ha’s.Winter’s Tale, ii. 1.

The silence often of pure innocence / Persuades when speaking fails.Winter’s Tale, ii. 2.

What’s gone and what’s past help / Should be past grief.Winter’s Tale, iii. 2.

’Tis a lucky day, boy, and we’ll do good deeds on’t.Winter’s Tale, iii. 3.

A snapper up of unconsidered trifles.Winter’s Tale, iv. 2.

Let me have no lying; it becomes none but tradesmen.Winter’s Tale, iv. 3.

The self-same sun that shines upon his court / Hides not his visage from our cottage, but / Looks on alike.Winter’s Tale, iv. 3.

There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.Winter’s Tale, v. 2.

For he is but a bastard to the time / That doth not smack of observation.King John, i. 1.

He is but a bastard to the time / That doth not smack of observation.King John, i. 1.

Here have we war for war, and blood for blood, / Controlment for controlment.King John, i. 1.

Lord of thy presence and no land beside.King John, i. 1.

New-made honour doth forget men’s names; / ’Tis too respective and too sociable, / For your conversion.King John, i. 1.

Courage mounteth with occasion.King John, ii. 1.

I have this great commission, / From that supernal judge that stirs good thoughts / In any breast of strong authority, / To look into the blots and stains of right.King John, ii. 1.

The peace of heaven is theirs who lift their swords / In such a just and charitable war.King John, ii. 1.

Further I will not flatter you, / That all I see in you is worthy love, / Than this; that nothing do I see in you / That should merit hate.King John, ii. 2.

He is the half part of a blessèd man, / Left to be finished by such as she; / And she a fair divided excellence, / Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.King John, ii. 2.

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.King John, ii. 2.

Grief is proud and makes his owner stout.King John, iii. 1.

Here I and sorrows sit; / Here is my throne; bid kings come bow to it.King John, iii. 1.

O let thy vow, / First made to heaven, first be to heaven perform’d…. It is religion that doth make vows kept.King John, iii. 1.

That which upholdeth him, that thee upholds—His honour.King John, iii. 1.

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 eve of heaven to garnish, / Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.King John, iii. 1.

When Fortune means to men most good, / She looks upon them with a threatening eye.King John, iii. 1.

Before the curing of a strong disease, / Even in the instant of repair and health, / The fit is strongest; evils that take leave, / On their departure most of all show evil.King John, iii. 4.

Evils that take leave, / On their departure most of all show evil.King John, iii. 4.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me; / Puts on his pretty look, 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.King John, iii. 4.

He that stands upon a slippery place / Makes nice of no vain hold to stay him up.King John, iii. 4.

I am not mad; I would to heaven I were! / For then ’tis like I should forget myself.King John, iii. 4.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, / Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.King John, iii. 4.

Strong reasons make strong actions.King John, iii. 4.

When your head did but ache, / I knit my handkerchief about your brows, / The best I had; a princess wrought it me; / And I did never ask it you again.King John, iv. 1.

And, often times, excusing of a fault / Doth make the fault worse by the excuse.King John, iv. 2.

Excusing of a fault / Doth make the fault worse by the excuse.King John, iv. 2.

How the sight of means to do ill deeds / Make deeds ill done!King John, iv. 2.

It is the curse of kings to be attended / By slaves, that take their humours for a warrant.King John, iv. 2.

There is no sure foundation set on blood; / No certain life achieved by others’ death.King John, iv. 2.

I am amazed, methinks, and lose my way / Among the thorns and dangers of the world.King John, iv. 3.

Trust not those cunning waters of his eyes, for villany is not without such rheum.King John, iv. 3.

Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire; / Threaten the threatner, and outface the brow / Of bragging horror; so shall inferior eyes, / That borrow their behaviours from the great, / Grow great by your example, and put on / The dauntless spirit of resolution.King John, v. 1.

Threaten the threatener, and outface the brow / Of bragging horror; so shall inferior eyes, / That borrow their behaviours from the great, / Grow great by your example, and put on / The dauntless spirit of resolution.King John, v. 1.

Come the three corners of the world in arms, / And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue, / If England to itself do rest but true.King John, v. 7.

Each day still better other’s happiness, / Until the heavens, envying earth’s good hap, / Add an immortal title to your crown.Richard II., i. 1.

Mine honour my life is; both grow in one; / Take honour from me, and my life is done.Richard II., i. 1.

The more fair and crystal is the sky, / The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly.Richard II., i. 1.

The purest treasure mortal times afford / Is spotless reputation; that away, / Men are but gilded loam or painted clay.Richard II., i. 1.

Grief boundeth where it falls, / Not with an empty hollowness, but weight.Richard II., i. 2.

That which in mean men we entitle patience, / Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.Richard II., i. 2.

Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more / Than when it bites but lanceth not the sore.Richard II., i. 3.

Gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite / The man that mocks at it and sets it light.Richard II., i. 3.

Grief makes one hour ten.Richard II., i. 3.

The apprehension of the good / Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.Richard II., i. 3.

Truth has a quiet breast.Richard II., i. 3.

Where’er I wander, boast of this I can, / Though banished, yet a true-born Englishman.Richard II., i. 3.

Woe does the heavier sit / Where it perceives it is but faintly borne.Richard II., i. 3.

But by bad courses may be understood, / That their events can never fall out good.Richard II., ii. 1.

Deal mildly with his youth; / For young hot colts, being raged, do rage the more.Richard II., ii. 1.

His rash, fierce blaze of riot cannot last, / For violent fires soon outburn themselves.Richard II., ii. 1.

The tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony.Richard II., ii. 1.

When words are scarce they’re seldom spent in vain, / For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.Richard II., ii. 1.

Young hot colts, being raged, do rage the more.Richard II., ii. 1.

Comfort’s in heaven; and we are on the earth, / Where nothing lives but crosses, care, and grief.Richard II., ii. 2.

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, / Which show like grief itself, but are not so; / For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, / Divides one thing entire to many objects.Richard II., ii. 2.

Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain.Richard II., ii. 2.

Evermore thanks, the exchequer of the poor.Richard II., ii. 3.

Hope to joy is little less in joy / Than hope enjoyed.Richard II., ii. 3.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm from an anointed king; / The breath of worldly men cannot depose / The deputy elected by the Lord.Richard II., iii 2.

Eating the bitter bread of banishment.Richard II., iii. 1.

Death will have his day.Richard II., iii. 2.

The means that Heaven yields must be embraced, / And not neglected.Richard II., iii. 2.

To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength, / Gives, in your weakness, strength unto your foe.Richard II., iii. 2.

To fight and die is death destroying death; / Where fearing dying, pays death servile breath.Richard II., iii. 2.

Within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king, / Keeps Death his court.Richard II., iii. 2.

They well deserve to have / That know the strong’st and surest way to get.Richard II., iii. 3.

Noisome weeds that without profit suck / The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers.Richard II., iii. 4.

Root away / The noisome weeds, which without profit suck / The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers.Richard II., iii. 4.

External manners of lament / Are merely shadows to the unseen grief / That swells with silence in the tortured soul.Richard II., iv. 1.

Gave / His body to that pleasant country’s earth, / And his pure soul unto his captain Christ, / Under whose colours he had fought so long.Richard II., iv. i.

Better far off, than—near, be ne’er the near’.Richard II., v. 1.

As in a theatre, the eyes of men, / After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, / Are idly bent on him that enters next, / Thinking his prattle to be tedious.Richard II., v. 2.

How sour sweet music is, when time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men’s lives.Richard II., v. 5.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.Richard II., v. 5.

No thought is contented. The better sort, / As thoughts of things divine, are intermixed / With scruples, and do set the word itself / Against the word.Richard II., v. 5.

They love not poison that do poison need.Richard II., v. 6.

Holy fields, / Over whose acres walked those blessed feet / Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail’d, / For our advantage, on the bitter cross.1 Henry IV., i. 1.

Those holy fields / Over whose acres walked those blesséd feet / Which, fourteen hundred years ago were nailed, / For our advantage, on the bitter cross.1 Henry IV., i. 1.

’Tis my vocation, Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.1 Henry IV., i. 2.

For wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it.1 Henry IV., i. 2.

Give the devil his due.1 Henry IV., i. 2.

If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work.1 Henry IV., i. 2.

Nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.1 Henry IV., i. 2.

Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin, new reap’d, / Show’d like a stubble-field at harvest-home; / He was perfuméd like a milliner, / And ’twixt his finger and his thumb he held / A pouncet-box, which ever and anon / He gave his nose, and took ’t away again.1 Henry IV., i. 3.

God save the mark.1 Henry IV., i. 3.

He was perfumed like a milliner, / And ’twixt his finger and his thumb he held / A pouncet-box, which ever and anon / He gave his nose, and took ’t away again.1 Henry IV., i. 3.

The blood more stirs / To rouse a lion than to start a hare.1 Henry IV., i. 3.

A plague of sighing and grief; it blows a man up like a bladder.1 Henry IV., i. 4.

Homo is a common name to all men.1 Henry IV., ii. 1.

I can teach you to command the devil, / And I can teach you to shame the devil, / By telling truth.1 Henry IV., ii. 1.

Out of this nettle danger we pluck this flower safety.1 Henry IV., ii. 3.

Give you a reason on compulsion? If reasons were as plenty as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.1 Henry IV., ii. 4.

Here I lay, and thus I bore my point.1 Henry IV., ii. 4.

If reasons were as plenty as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.1 Henry IV., ii. 4.

In King Cambyses’ vein.1 Henry IV., ii. 4.

Instinct is a great matter; I was a coward on instinct.1 Henry IV., ii. 4.

Nay, that’s past praying for.1 Henry IV., ii. 4.

The camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows; yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.1 Henry IV., ii. 4.

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” “Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?”1 Henry IV., iii. 1.

Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth / In strange eruptions, and the teeming earth / Is with a kind of cholic pinch’d and vex’d / By the imprisoning of unruly wind / Within her womb, which, for enlargement striving, / Shakes the old beldam earth, and topples down / Steeples and moss-grown towers.1 Henry IV., iii. 1.

I will give thrice as much to any well-deserving friend; but in the way of bargain, mark me, I will cavil on the ninth part of a hair.1 Henry IV., iii. 1.

Tell the truth and shame the devil.1 Henry IV., iii. 1.

While you live, tell truth and shame the devil.1 Henry IV., iii. 1.

Company, villanous company, has been the spoil of me.1 Henry IV., iii. 3.

Food for powder.1 Henry IV., iv. 2.

Honour hath no skill in surgery…. Honour is a mere scutcheon.1 Henry IV., v. 1.

I would it were bed-time, Hal, and all well.1 Henry IV., v. 1.

Suspicion shall be all stuck full of eyes.1 Henry IV., v. 1.

Look how we can, or sad or merrily, / Interpretation will misquote our looks.1 Henry IV., v. 2.

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.1 Henry IV., v. 4.

I could have better spared a better man.1 Henry IV., v. 4.

The better part of valour is discretion.1 Henry IV., v. 4.

Thoughts (are) the slaves of life, and life time’s fool; / And time, that takes survey of all the world, / Must have a stop.1 Henry IV., v. 4.

Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere.1 Henry IV., v. 4.

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.2 Henry IV., Induc.

Contention, like a horse / Full of high feeding, madly hath broken loose, / And bears all down before him.2 Henry IV., i. 1.

It was alway yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common.2 Henry IV., i. 2.

Past and to come seem best, things present worst.2 Henry IV., i. 2.

O thoughts of men accurst! / Past and to come seem best; things present, worst.2 Henry IV., i. 3.

Thus we play the fools with the time; and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds, and mock us.2 Henry IV., ii. 2.

We play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.2 Henry IV., ii. 2.

Happy lowly clown! / Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!2 Henry IV., iii. 1.

O sleep, O gentle sleep, / Nature’s soft nurse! how have I frighted thee, / That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down, / And steep my senses in forgetfulness!2 Henry IV., iii. 1.

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.2 Henry IV., iii. 1.

Sleep, gentle sleep, / Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, / That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down, / And steep my senses in forgetfulness?2 Henry IV., iii. 1.

There is a history in all men’s lives, / Figuring the nature of the times deceased; / The which observed, a man may prophesy, / With a near aim of the main chance of things / As yet not come to life: which, in their seeds / And weak beginnings, lie intreasurèd.2 Henry IV., iii. 1.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.2 Henry IV., iii. 1.

Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs, / Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee, / And hush’d with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber, / Than in the perfumed chambers of the great, / Under the canopies of costly state, / And lull’d with sounds of sweetest melody?2 Henry IV., iii. 1.

With all appliances and means to boot.2 Henry IV., iii. 1.

Great men oft die by vile Bezonians.2 Henry IV., iv. 1.

He hath a tear for pity, and a hand / Open as day for melting charity.2 Henry IV., iv. 4.

How quickly Nature falls into revolt / When gold becomes her object!2 Henry IV., iv. 4.

Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds.2 Henry IV., iv. 4.

The wish was father to the thought.2 Henry IV., iv. 4.

Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.2 Henry IV., iv. 4.

It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught as men take diseases, one of another.2 Henry IV., v. 1.

How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester.2 Henry IV., v. 5.

Consideration, like an angel, came, / And whipp’d th’ offending Adam out of him, / Leaving his body as a paradise, / To envelop and contain celestial spirits.Henry V., i. 1.

List his discourse of war, and you shall hear / A fearful battle render’d you in music; / Turn him to any cause of policy, / The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose, / Familiar as his garter.Henry V., i. 1.

Miracles are ceased, and therefore we must needs admit the means, how things are perfected.Henry V., i. 1.

The strawberry grows under the nettle, / And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best / Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality.Henry V., i. 1.

Turn him to any cause of policy, / The Gordian knot of it he will unloose, / Familiar as his garter.Henry V., i. 1.

When he speaks, / The air, a charter’d libertine, is still.Henry V., i. 1.

Wholesome berries thrive and ripen best, / Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality.Henry V., i. 1.

’Tis ever common that men are merriest when they are from home.Henry V., i. 2.

If we … / Cannot defend our own doors from the dog, / Let us be worried, and our nation lose / The name of hardiness and policy.Henry V., i. 2.

No woman shall succeed in Salique land.Henry V., i. 2.

So work the honey bees; / Creatures that, by a rule in Nature, teach / The art of order to a peopled kingdom.Henry V., i. 2.

That’s the humour of it.Henry V., ii. 1.

This is the humour of it.Henry V., ii. 1.

For oaths are straws, men’s faith are wafer cakes, / And holdfast is the only dog, my duck.Henry V., ii. 3.

Oaths are straws,… and holdfast is the only dog.Henry V., ii. 3.

Coward dogs / Most spend their mouths when what they seem to threaten / Runs far before them.Henry V., ii. 4.

Self love is not so vile a sin / As self-neglecting.Henry V., ii. 4.

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, / Disguise fair Nature with hard-favour’d rage, / Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; / Let it pry through the portage of the head / Like the brass cannons.Henry V., iii. 1.

Ye good yeomen, whose limbs were made in England.Henry V., iii. 1.

He has a killing tongue and a quiet sword, by the means whereof a’ breaks words and keeps whole weapons.Henry V., iii. 2.

I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.Henry V., iii. 2.

Men of few words are the best men.Henry V., iii. 2.

What rein can hold licentious wickedness / When down the hill he holds his fierce career?Henry V., iii. 3.

Advantage is a better soldier than rashness.Henry V., iii. 6.

A fool’s bolt is soon shot.Henry V., iii. 7.

Doing is activity; and he will still be doing.Henry V., iii. 7.

From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night, / The hum of either army stilly sounds, / That the fix’d sentinels almost receive / The secret whispers of each other’s watch; / Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames / Each battle sees the other’s umber’d face; / Steed threatens steed in high and boastful neighs, / Piercing the night’s dull ear, and from the tents / The armourers, accomplishing the knights, / With busy hammers closing rivets up, / Give dreadful note of preparation.Henry V., iv. (chorus).

Every subject’s duty is the king’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.Henry V., iv. 1.

There is some soul of goodness in things evil, / Would men observingly distil it out.Henry V., iv. 1.

We are in great danger; / The greater therefore should our courage be.Henry V., iv. 1.

What have kings that privates have not too, / Save ceremony, save general ceremony?Henry V., iv. 1.

Household words.Henry V., iv. 3.

The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.Henry V., iv. 4.

Maids well summered, and warm kept, are like flies at Bartholomew-tide—blind, though they have their eyes.Henry V., v. 2.

This day / Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love.Henry V., v. 2.

Glory is like a circle in the water, / Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, / Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to naught.1 Henry VI., i. 2.

Unbidden guests / Are often welcomest when they are gone.1 Henry VI., ii. 2.

No, no! I am but shadow of myself; / You are deceived, my substance is not here.1 Henry VI., ii. 3.

What you see is but the smallest part / And least proportion of humanity; / … Were the whole frame here, / It is of such a spacious lofty pitch, / Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.1 Henry VI., ii. 3.

If I for my opinion bleed, / Opinion shall be surgeon to my hurt.1 Henry VI., ii. 4.

Civil dissension is a viperous worm / That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth.1 Henry VI., iii. 1.

Defer no time; / Delays have dangerous ends.1 Henry VI., iii. 2.

Care is no cure, but rather a corrosive, / For things that are not to be remedied.1 Henry VI., iii. 3.

Strike those that hurt, and hurt not those that help.1 Henry VI., iii. 3.

The quarrel toucheth none but us alone, / Betwixt ourselves let us decide it then.1 Henry VI., iv. 1.

She’s beautiful, and therefore to be woo’d; / She’s a woman, and therefore to be won.1 Henry VI., v. 3.

O Lord, that lend’st me life, / Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!2 Henry VI., i. 1.

Thou hast given me / A world of earthly blessings to my soul, / If sympathy of love unite our thoughts.2 Henry VI., i. 1.

Banish the canker of ambitious thoughts.2 Henry VI., i. 2.

She bears a duke’s revenues on her back.2 Henry VI., i. 3.

’Tis but a base, ignoble mind / That mounts no higher than a bird can soar.2 Henry VI., ii. 1.

Let never day nor night unhallow’d pass, / But still remember what the Lord hath done.2 Henry VI., ii. 1.

My joy is death;— / Death, at whose name I oft have been afeared, / Because I wish’d this world’s eternity.2 Henry VI., ii. 4.

Sort thy heart to patience; / These few days’ wonder will be quickly worn.2 Henry VI., ii. 4.

Now ’tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted; / Suffer them now, and they’ll o’ergrow the garden, / And choke the herbs for want of husbandry.2 Henry VI., iii. 1.

Small curs are not regarded when they grin; / But great men tremble when the lion roars.2 Henry VI., iii. 1.

Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep; / And in his simple show he harbours treason. / The fox barks not when he would steal the lamb.2 Henry VI., iii. 1.

Virtue is choked with foul ambition.2 Henry VI., iii. 1.

What’s more miserable than discontent?2 Henry VI., iii. 1.

Thrice is he arm’d that hath his quarrel just; / And he but naked, though locked up in steel, / Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.2 Henry VI., iii. 2.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted!2 Henry VI., iii. 2.

Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.2 Henry VI., iii. 3.

Rather let my head stoop to the block than these knees bow to any save to the God of heaven.2 Henry VI., iv. 1.

There is no better sign of a brave mind than a hard hand.2 Henry VI., iv. 2.

Now join your hands, and with your hands your hearts, / That no dissension hinder government.2 Henry VI., iv. 6.

Ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.2 Henry VI., iv. 7.

Knowledge, the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.2 Henry VI., iv. 7.

I seek not to wax great by others’ waning.2 Henry VI., iv. 10.

It is a great sin to swear unto a sin, / But a greater still to keep a sinful oath.2 Henry VI., v. 1.

Let them obey that know not how to rule.2 Henry VI., v. 1.

Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill.2 Henry VI., v. 2.

“What says Lord Warwick? Shall we after them?” “After them! Nay, before them, if we can.”2 Henry VI., v. 3.

Patience is good for poltroons.3 Henry VI., i. 1.

Who can be patient in extremes?3 Henry VI., i. 1.

’Tis beauty that doth oft make women proud; / ’Tis virtue that doth make them most admired; / ’Tis government that makes them seem divine.3 Henry VI., i. 4.

Beggars, mounted, run their horse to death.3 Henry VI., i. 4.

It is war’s prize to take all advantages, / And ten to one is no impeach of valour.3 Henry VI., i. 4.

Hercules himself must yield to odds; / And many strokes, though with a little axe, / Hew down and fell the hardest-timber’d oak.3 Henry VI., ii. 1.

Many strokes, though with a little axe, / Hew down and fell the hardest timber’d oak.3 Henry IV., ii. 1.

Sound trumpets!—let our bloody colours wave; / And either victory or else a grave.3 Henry VI., ii. 2.

The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on; / And doves will peck, in safeguard of their brood.3 Henry VI., ii. 2.

Things ill got had ever bad success…. I’ll leave my son my virtuous deeds behind.3 Henry VI., ii. 2.

Our hap is lost, our hope but sad despair.3 Henry VI., ii. 3.

Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade / To shepherds, looking on their silly sheep, / Than doth a rich embroider’d canopy / To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery.3 Henry VI., ii. 5.

Whilst lions war and battle for their dens, / Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity.3 Henry VI., ii. 5.

Some troops pursue the bloody-minded queen / That led calm Henry.3 Henry VI., ii. 6.

What doth cherish weeds, but gentle air? / And what makes robbers bold, but too much lenity?3 Henry VI., ii. 6.

Look, as I blow this feather from my face, / And as the air blows it to me again / … Commanded always by the greater gust; / Such is the lightness of you common men.3 Henry VI., iii. 1.

Impatience waiteth on true sorrow.3 Henry VI., iii. 3.

Yield not thy neck / To fortune’s yoke, but let thy dauntless mind / Still ride in triumph over all mischance.3 Henry VI., iii. 3.

England is safe if true within itself.3 Henry VI., iv. 1.

I hear, yet say not much, but think the more.3 Henry VI., iv. 1.

Let us be back’d with God, and with the seas, / Which He hath given for fence impregnable, / And with these helps only defend ourselves; / In them, and in ourselves, our safety lies.3 Henry VI., iv. 1.

I hold it cowardice / To rest mistrustful where a noble heart / Hath pawn’d an open hand in sign of love.3 Henry VI., iv. 2.

What fates impose, that men must needs abide; / It boots not to resist both wind and tide.3 Henry VI., iv. 3.

Trust not him that hath once broken faith.3 Henry VI., iv. 4.

Fearless minds climb soonest into crowns.3 Henry VI., iv. 7.

A little fire is quickly trodden out; / Which being suffered, rivers cannot quench.3 Henry VI., iv. 8.

What is the body when the head is off?3 Henry VI., v. 1.

Live we how we can, yet die we must.3 Henry VI., v. 2.

Every cloud engenders not a storm.3 Henry VI., v. 3.

What cannot be avoided, / ’Twere childish weakness to lament or fear.3 Henry VI., v. 4.

Wise men ne’er sit and wail their loss, / But cheerly seek how to redress their harms.3 Henry VI., v. 4.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; / The thief doth fear each bush an officer.3 Henry VI., v. 6.

A pity that the eagle should be mew’d, / While kites and buzzards prey at liberty.Richard III., i. 1.

Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, / And that so lamely and unfashionable, / That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.Richard III., i. 1.

Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front…. He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber, / To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.Richard III., i. 1.

The winter of our discontent.Richard III., i. 1.

Leave this keen encounter of our wits, / And fall somewhat into a slower method.Richard III., i. 2.

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.Richard III., i. 2.

Was ever woman in this humour woo’d? / Was ever woman in this humour won?Richard III., i. 2.

You know no rules of charity, / Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses.Richard III., i. 2.

Since every Jack became a gentleman, / There’s many a gentle person made a Jack.Richard III., i. 3.

Talkers are no good doers.Richard III., i. 3.

They that stand high have many blasts to shake them; and if they fall, they dash themselves to pieces.Richard III., i. 3.

Sorrow breaks seasons and reposing hours, / Makes the night morning and the noontide night.Richard III., i. 4.

’Tis death to me to be at enmity; / I hate it, and desire all good men’s love.Richard III., ii. 1.

We have done deeds of charity, / Made peace of enmity, fair love of hate.Richard III., ii. 1.

Ah! that deceit should steal such gentle shapes / And with a virtuous visor hide deep vice.Richard III., ii. 2.

None can cure their harms by wailing them.Richard III., ii. 2.

When clouds appear, wise men put on their cloaks; / When great leaves fall, the winter is at hand.Richard III., ii. 3.

Woe to that land that’s govern’d by a child.Richard III., ii. 3.

Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace.Richard III., ii. 4.

Sweet flowers are slow, and weeds make haste.Richard III., ii. 4.

No more can you distinguish of a man / Than of his outward show; which, God he knows, / Seldom or never jumpeth with the heart.Richard III., iii. 1.

So wise, so young, they say, do ne’er live long.Richard III., iii. 1.

’Tis a vile thing to die … / When men are unprepar’d and look not for it.Richard III., iii. 2.

When holy and devout religious men / Are at their beads, ’tis hard to draw them thence.Richard III., iii. 7.

Off with his head! so much for Buckingham.Richard III., iv. 3.

“Why should calamity be full of words?” / “Let them have scope; though what they do impart / Help not at all, yet do they ease the heart.”Richard III., iv. 4.

An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told.Richard III., iv. 4.

Rest thy unrest in England’s lawful earth.Richard III., iv. 4.

True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings; / Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.Richard III., v. 2.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use, / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe; / Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.Richard III., v. 3.

Shadows to-night / Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard / Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers.Richard III., v. 3.

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse.Richard III., v. 4.

I have set my life upon a cast, / And I will stand the hazard of the die.Richard III., v. 4.

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot / That it doth singe yourself.Henry VIII., i. 1.

Let your reason with your choler question…. To climb steep hills / Requires slow pace at first.Henry VIII., i. 1.

No man’s pie is freed / From his ambitious finger.Henry VIII., i. 1.

To climb steep hills requires slow pace at first.Henry VIII., i. 1.

We may outrun / By violent swiftness that which we run at, / And lose by overrunning.Henry VIII., i. 1.

Anger is like / A full-hot horse; who, being allow’d his way, / Self-mettle tires him.Henry VIII., i. 2.

Love yourself, and in that love / Not unconsidered leave your honour.Henry VIII., i. 2.

We must not stint / Our necessary actions, in the fear / To cope malicious censurers; which ever, / As ravenous fishes, do a vessel follow / That is new trimmed, but benefit no further / Than vainly longing.Henry VIII., i. 2.

’Tis better to be lowly born, / And range with humble livers in content, / Than to be perked up in a glistering grief, / And wear a golden sorrow.Henry VIII., ii. 2.

I love him not, nor fear him; there’s my creed.Henry VIII., ii. 2.

Our content / Is our best having.Henry VIII., ii. 3.

Heaven is above all yet; there sits a Judge / That no king can corrupt.Henry VIII., iii. 1.

Truth loves open dealing.Henry VIII., iii. 1.

’Tis a kind of good deed to say well: / And yet words are no deeds.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

Be just and fear not; / Let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy country’s, / Thy God’s, and truth’s.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness! / This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth / The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, / And bears his blushing honours thick upon him: / The third day comes a frost, a killing frost: / And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely / His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, / And then he falls, as I do.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

Fling away ambition; / By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then, / The image of his Maker, hope to win by it?Henry VIII., iii. 2.

Had I but serv’d my God with half the zeal / I serv’d my king, He would not in mine age / Have left me naked to mine enemies.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

I charge thee, fling away ambition; / By that sin fell the angels.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

I feel within me a peace above all earthly dignities, a still and quiet conscience.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

O how wretched / Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favours! / There is betwixt that smile he would aspire to, / That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin, / More pangs and fears than wars or women have; / And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, / Never to hope again.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace, / To silence envious tongues.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth / The tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms, / And bears his blushing honours thick upon him; / The third day comes a frost, a killing frost; / And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely / His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, / And then he falls, as I do.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

From his cradle / He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one; / Exceeding wise, fair-spoken, and persuading; / Lofty and sour to them that loved him not, / But to those men who sought him, sweet as summer; / And to add greater honours to his age / Than man could give; he died fearing God.Henry VIII., iv. 2.

He gave his honours to the world again, / His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace.Henry VIII., iv. 2.

He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one; / Exceeding wise, fair spoken, and persuading; / Lofty and sour to them that loved him not; / But to those men that sought him, sweet as summer.Henry VIII., iv. 2.

Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues / We write in water.Henry VIII., iv. 2.

So may he rest; his faults lie gently on him.Henry VIII., iv. 2.

You have many enemies that know not / Why they are so, but, like to village curs, / Bark when their fellows do.Henry VIII., iv. 2.

’Tis a cruelty / To load a falling man.Henry VIII., v. 2.

Dance attendance on their lordships’ pleasure.Henry VIII., v. 2.

To dance attendance on their lordships’ pleasures.Henry VIII., v. 2.

Men that make / Envy and crooked malice nourishment / Dare bite the best.Henry VIII., v. 3.

Sorrow that is couched in seeming gladness / Is like that mirth fate turns to sudden sadness.Troil. and Cress., i. 1.

Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.Troil. and Cress., i. 2.

No man hath a virtue that he has not a glimpse of; nor any man an attaint, but he carries some stain of it.Troil. and Cress., i. 2.

Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.Troil. and Cress., i. 2.

Blunt edges rive hard knots.Troil. and Cress., i. 3.

Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan / Puffing at all, winnows the light away.Troil. and Cress., i. 3.

’Tis mad idolatry / To make the service greater than the god.Troil. and Cress., ii. 2.

Modest doubt is called / The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches / To the bottom of the worst.Troil. and Cress., ii. 2.

Pleasure and revenge / Have ears more deaf than adders to the voice / Of any true decision.Troil. and Cress., ii. 2.

What is aught but as ’tis valued?Troil. and Cress., ii. 2.

What’s aught but as ’tis valued?Troil. and Cress., ii. 2.

He that is proud eats up himself; pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle; and whatever praises itself but in the deed devours the deed in the praise.Troil. and Cress., ii. 3.

This is the monstrosity in love—that the will is infinite, and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit.Troil. and Cress., iii. 2.

To be wise and love exceeds man’s might.Troil. and Cress., iii. 2.

Who shall be true to us, / When we are so unsecret to ourselves?Troil. and Cress., iii. 2.

Words pay no debts.Troil. and Cress., iii. 2.

For emulation hath a thousand sons, / That one by one pursue; if you give way, / Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, / Like to an enter’d tide, they all rush by, / And leave you hindmost.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

Greatness, once fallen out with fortune, / Must fall out with men too; what the declined is, / He shall as soon read in the eyes of others / As feel in his own fall.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

Honour travels in a strait so narrow, / Where one but goes abreast.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

Light boats sail swift, though greater hulks draw deep.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

Love, friendship, charity are subjects all / To envious and calumniating time.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

Not a man, for being simply man, / Hath any honour, but honour for those honours / That are without him, as place, riches, favour, / Prizes of accident, as oft as merit.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

Perseverance, dear, my lord, / Keeps honour bright. To have done is to hang / Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail, / In monumental mockery.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

Pride hath no other glass to show itself but pride.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

Time is like a fashionable host, / That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand; / And with his arms outstretched, as he would fly, / Grasps in the comer.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

To have done, is to hang / Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail, / In monumental mockery.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

The end crowns all, / And that old common arbitrator, Time, / Will one day end it.Troil. and Cress., iv. 5.

There’s language in her eye, her cheeks, her lip, / Nay, her foot speaks.Troil. and Cress., iv. 5.

Life every man holds dear; but the brave man / Holds honour far more precious dear than life.Troil. and Cress., v. 3.

You are transported by calamity / Thither where more attends you.Coriolanus, i. 1.

Every man has a bag hanging before him in which he puts his neighbour’s faults, and another behind him in which he stows his own.Coriolanus, ii. 1.

Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.Coriolanus, ii. 1.

O that you could turn your eyes toward the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves!Coriolanus, ii. 1.

His nature is too noble for the world; / He would not flatter Neptune for his trident, / Or Jove for his power to thunder.Coriolanus, iii. 1.

Purpose barred, it follows, / Nothing is done to purpose.Coriolanus, iii. 1.

What is the city but the people? True, the people are the city.Coriolanus, iii. 1.

Common chances common men can bear.Coriolanus, iv. 1.

Extremity is the trier of spirits.Coriolanus, iv. 1.

You were used / To say, extremity was the trier of spirits; / That common chances common men could bear; / That when the sea was calm, all boats alike / Showed mastership in floating.Coriolanus, iv. 1.

Our / Virtues lie in the interpretation of the time.Coriolanus, iv. 7.

Chaste as the icicle / That’s curded by the frost from purest snow, / And hangs on Dian’s temple.Coriolanus, v. 3.

There is differency between a grub and a butterfly; yet your butterfly was a grub.Coriolanus, v. 4.

Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods? Draw near them, then, in being merciful.Shakespeare, Tit. Andron., i. 1.

Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.Tit. Andron., i. 2.

More water glideth by the mill / Than wots the miller of.Tit. Andron., ii. 1.

She is a woman, therefore may be wooed; she is a woman, therefore may be won.Tit. Andron., ii. 1.

A very excellent piece of villany.Tit. Andron., ii. 3.

Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopped, / Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.Tit, Andron., ii. 5.

The eagle suffers little birds to sing.Tit. Andron., iv. 4.

Friends should associate friends in grief and woe.Tit. Andron., v. 3.

A madness most discreet, / A choking gall and a preserving sweet.—i.e., love is.Romeo and Juliet, i. 1.

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: / What is it else? A madness most discreet, / A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.Romeo and Juliet, i. 1.

One fire burns out another’s burning; / One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.Romeo and Juliet, i. 1.

The weakest goes to the wall.Romeo and Juliet, i. 1.

Compare her face with some that I shall show, / And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.Romeo and Juliet, i. 2.

Come, we burn daylight.Romeo and Juliet, i. 4.

Dreams are the children of an idle brain, / Begot of nothing but vain phantasy; / Which are as thin of substance as the air, / And more inconstant than the wind.Romeo and Juliet, i. 4.

In delay / We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day.Romeo and Juliet, i. 4.

Beauty too rich for use; for earth too dear.Romeo and Juliet, i. 5.

Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye, / And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.

Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say aye; / And I will take thy word. Yet if thou swear’st, / Thou may’st prove false; at lovers’ perjuries / They say Jove laughs.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.

Good-night, good-night; parting is such sweet sorrow / That I will say good-night till it be to-morrow.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.

He jests at scars that never felt a wound.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.

How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, / Like softest music to attending ears!Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.

Love goes toward love, as schoolboys from their books; / But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.

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 and Juliet, ii. 2.

Stony limits cannot hold love out; / And what love can do, that dares love attempt.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.

What love can do, that dares love attempt.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.

Earth, that’s Nature’s mother, is her tomb.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 3.

For nought so vile that on the earth doth live, / But to the earth some special good doth give; / Nor aught so good, but, strain’d from that fair use, / Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 3.

Nought is so vile that on the earth doth live, / But to the earth some special good doth give; / Nor aught so good, but, strain’d from that fair use, / Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 3.

The earth, that’s Nature’s mother, is her tomb.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 3.

Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, / And vice sometime ’s by action dignified.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 3.

Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 3.

Women may fall when there’s no strength in men.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 3.

A gentleman that will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 4.

O flesh, flesh, how thou art fishified.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 4.

Love’s heralds should be thoughts, / Which ten times faster glide than the sun’s beams / Driving back shadows over lowering hills.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 5.

Come what sorrow can, / It cannot countervail th’ exchange of joy / That one short minute gives me in her sight.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 6.

Love moderately; long love doth so; / Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 6.

These violent delights have violent ends.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 6.

They are but beggars that can count their worth.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 6.

Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 6.

Violent delights have violent ends, / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which, as they kiss, consume.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 6.

I am fortune’s fool.Romeo and Juliet, iii. 1.

Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.Romeo and Juliet, iii. 1.

Thou! why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes…. Thy head is full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat.Romeo and Juliet, iii. 1.

Come, civil night, / Thou sober-suited matron, all in black.Romeo and Juliet, iii. 2.

Give me my Romeo: and, when he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night, / And pay no homage to the garish sun.Romeo and Juliet, iii. 2.

Sour woe delights in fellowship, / And needly will be rank’d with other griefs.Romeo and Juliet, iii. 2.

Adversity’s sweet milk—philosophy.Romeo and Juliet, iii. 3.

It was the nightingale, and not the lark / That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.Romeo and Juliet, iii. 5.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day / Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops.Romeo and Juliet, iii. 5.

Some grief shows much of love, / But much of grief shows still more want of wit.Romeo and Juliet, iii. 5.

What must be, shall be.Romeo and Juliet, iv. 1.

Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again. / I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins, / That almost freezes up the heat of life.Romeo and Juliet, iv. 3.

Death lies on her, like an untimely frost, / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.Romeo and Juliet, iv. 5.

Heaven and yourself / Had part in this fair maid (Juliet); now heaven hath all.Romeo and Juliet, iv. 5.

Nature’s tears are Reason’s merriment.Romeo and Juliet, iv. 5.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, / And doleful dumps the mind oppress, / Then music, with her silver sound, / With speedy help doth lend redress.Romeo and Juliet, iv. 5.

A beggarly account of empty boxes.Romeo and Juliet, v. 1.

Come, cordial, not poison.Romeo and Juliet, v. 1.

The world is not thy friend, nor the world’s law.Romeo and Juliet, v. 1.

Heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.Romeo and Juliet, v. 3.

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, / That Heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.Romeo and Juliet, v. 3.

’Tis not enough to keep the feeble up, / But to support them after.Timon of Athens, i. 1.

Ceremony was but devised at first / To set a gloss on faint deeds … / But where there is true friendship, there needs none.Timon of Athens, i. 2.

Friendship’s full of dregs.Timon of Athens, i. 2.

Great men should drink with harness on their throats.Timon of Athens, i. 2.

O that men’s ears should be / To counsel deaf, but not to flattery!Timon of Athens, i. 2.

What need we have any friends, if we should never have need of them?Timon of Athens, i. 2.

Feast-won, fast-lost.Timon of Athens, ii. 2.

Every man has his fault, and honesty is his.Timon of Athens, iii. 1.

Policy sits above conscience.Timon of Athens, iii. 2.

The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic; be crossed himself by it.Timon of Athens, iii. 3.

For pity is the virtue of the law, / And none but tyrants use it cruelly.Timon of Athens, iii. 5.

He’s most truly valiant / That can wisely suffer the worst that man / Can breathe; and make his wrongs his outsides: / To wear them like his raiment, carelessly, / And ne’er prefer his injuries to his heart, / To bring it into danger.Timon of Athens, iii. 5.

Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.Timon of Athens, iii. 5.

Pity is the virtue of the law, / And none but tyrants use it cruelly.Timon of Athens, iii. 5.

The law is past depth to those that, without heed, do plunge into it.Timon of Athens, iii. 5.

To revenge is no valour, but to bear.Timon of Athens, iii. 5.

Many arrive at second masters / Upon their first lord’s neck.Timon of Athens, iv. 3.

Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes.Timon of Athens, iv. 3.

There is no time so miserable, but a man may be true.Timon of Athens, iv. 3.

What man didst thou ever know unthrift, that was beloved after his means?Timon of Athens, iv. 3.

A great observer, and he looks / Quite through the deeds of men.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Cæsar.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

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.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

He reads much: / He is a great observer, and he looks / Quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays, / As thou dost, Anthony; he hears no music: / Seldom he smiles; and smiles in such a sort / As if he mock’d himself, and scorn’d his spirit / That could be moved to smile at anything. / Such men as he be never at heart’s ease / Whiles they behold a greater than themselves; / And therefore are they very dangerous.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

I had as lief not be, as live to be / In awe of such a thing as I myself.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

I love / The name of honour more than I fear death.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

If it be aught toward the general good, / Set honour in one eye, and death i’ the other, / And I will look on both indifferently; / For, let the gods so speed me, as I love / The name of honour more than I fear death.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

It is meet / That noble minds keep ever with their likes; / For who so firm that cannot be seduced?Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

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.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

Men at some time are masters of their fate.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

Rome (room) indeed, and room enough, / When there is in it but one only man.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort, / As if he mock’d himself, and scorn’d his spirit, / That could be moved to smile at anything.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

The eye sees not itself, / But by reflection, by some other things.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

Who so firm that cannot be seduced?Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

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.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

Ye gods, it doth amaze me / A man of such a feeble temper should / So get the start of the majestic world / And bear the palm alone.Julius Cæsar, i. 2.

But men may construe things after their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves.Julius Cæsar, i. 3.

Those that with haste will make a mighty fire, / Begin with weak straws.Julius Cæsar, i. 3.

As dear to me as are the ruddy drops / That visit my sad heart.Julius Cæsar, ii. 1.

Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.Julius Cæsar, ii. 1.

Brutus, thou sleep’st; awake, and see thyself.Julius Cæsar, ii. 1.

It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, / And that craves wary walking.Julius Cæsar, ii. 1.

Lowliness is young ambition’s ladder, / Whereto the climber-upward turns his face; / But when he once attains the upmost round, / He then unto the ladder turns his back, / Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees / By which he did ascend.Julius Cæsar, ii. 1.

You are my true and honourable wife, / As dear to me as are the ruddy drops / That visit my sad heart.Julius Cæsar, ii. 1.

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.Julius Cæsar, ii. 2.

Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds, / In ranks and squadrons, and right form of war, / Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol.Julius Cæsar, ii. 2.

Have I in conquest stretched mine arm so far / To be afeard to tell gray-beards the truth?Julius Cæsar, ii. 2.

Most strange that men should fear, / Seeing that death, a necessary end, / Will come when it will come.Julius Cæsar, ii. 2.

The things that threatened me, / Ne’er look’d but on my back; when they shall see / The face of Cæsar, they are vanished.Julius Cæsar, ii. 2.

When beggars die, there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.Julius Cæsar, ii. 2.

Last, not least.Julius Cæsar, iii. 1. King Lear, i. 1.

But I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fixed and resting quality, / There is no fellow in the firmament.Julius Cæsar, iii. 1.

Cry “Havock,” and let slip the dogs of war.Julius Cæsar, iii. 1.

How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!Julius Cæsar, iii. 1.

I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament.Julius Cæsar, iii. 1.

O mighty Cæsar! dost thou lie so low? / Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, / Shrunk to this little measure?Julius Cæsar, iii. 1.

That we shall die, we know; ’tis but the time / And drawing days out, that men stand upon.Julius Cæsar, iii. 1.

Thou art the ruin of the noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times.Julius Cæsar, iii. 1.

Though last, not least.Julius Cæsar, iii. 1.

The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interréd with their bones.Julius Cæsar, viii. 2.

But were I Brutus, / And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony / Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue / In every wound of Cæsar, that should move / The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

But yesterday the word of Cæsar might / Have stood against the world; now lies he there, / And none so poor to do him reverence.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

For Brutus is an honourable man, / So are they all, all honourable men.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

Fortune is merry, and in this mood will give us anything.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

Here was a Cæsar! when comes such another?Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

I am no orator, as Brutus is; / But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man, / That loves my friend.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

Mischief, thou art afoot; / Take thou what course thou wilt.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

Not that I loved Cæsar less, but that I loved Rome more.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, / And men have lost their reason!Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

Oh, what a fall was there, my countrymen! / Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, / Whilst bloody treason flourished over us.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

Put a tongue / In every wound of Cæsar that should move / The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

This was the most unkindest cut of all.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

When that the poor have cried. Cæsar hath wept; / Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.

There are no tricks in plain and simple faith.Julius Cæsar, iv. 2.

When love begins to sicken and decay / It useth an enforced ceremony.Julius Cæsar, iv. 2.

Contaminate our fingers with base bribes?… I’d rather be a dog; and bay the moon than such a Roman.Julius Cæsar, iv. 3.

Good reasons must of force give place to better.Julius Cæsar, iv. 3.

I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon, / Than such a Roman.Julius Cæsar, iv. 3.

Nature must obey necessity.Julius Cæsar, iv. 3.

That carries anger as the flint bears fire; / Who, much enforcèd, shows a hasty spark, / And straight is cold again.Julius Cæsar, iv. 3.

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.Julius Cæsar, iv. 3.

There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats; / For I am armed so strong in honesty / That they pass by me as the idle wind / Which I respect not.Julius Cæsar, iv. 3.

We must take the current when it serves, / Or lose our ventures.Julius Cæsar, iv. 3.

For I am full of spirit, and resolved / To meet all perils very constantly.Julius Cæsar, v. 1.

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!Julius Cæsar, v. 5.

This was a man.Julius Cæsar, v. 5.

When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?Macbeth, i. 1.

The multiplying villanies of nature / Do swarm upon him.Macbeth, i. 2.

’Tis strange; / 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, i. 3.

Come what come may, / Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.Macbeth, i. 3.

Nothing is but what is not.Macbeth, i. 3.

Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths; / Win us with honest trifles, to betray us / In deepest consequence.Macbeth, i. 3.

Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings.Macbeth, i. 3.

The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, / And these are of them.Macbeth, i. 3.

Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it; he died / As one that had been studied in his death / To throw away the dearest thing he owed, / As ’twere a careless trifle.Macbeth, i. 4.

There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face.Macbeth, i. 4.

I fear thy nature; / It is too full of the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way.Macbeth, i. 5.

Make thick my blood, / Stop up the access and passage to remorse, / That no compunctious visitings of Nature / Shake my fell purpose.Macbeth, i. 5.

O never / Shall sun that morrow see.Macbeth, i. 5.

Thy nature / It is too full of the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way.Macbeth, i. 5.

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, i. 5.

Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ the milk o’ human kindness.Macbeth, i. 5.

Coigne of vantage.Macbeth, i. 6.

Bring forth men-children only! / For thy undaunted mettle should compose. / Nothing but males.Macbeth, i. 7.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.Macbeth, i. 7.

I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more, is none.Macbeth, i. 7.

I have bought / Golden opinions from all sorts of people.Macbeth, i. 7.

I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent.Macbeth, i. 7.

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly … that but this blow / Might be the be all and the end all here.Macbeth, i. 7.

Memory, the warder of the brain.Macbeth, i. 7.

Screw your courage to the sticking-place, / And we’ll not fail.Macbeth, i. 7.

That but this blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all here, / But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, / We’d jump the life to come.Macbeth, i. 7.

There’s husbandry in heaven; / Their candles are all out.Macbeth, i. 7.

This even-handed justice / Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice / To our own lips.Macbeth, i. 7.

Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, / And falls on the other.Macbeth, i. 7.

We fail? / But screw your courage to the sticking-place, / And we’ll not fail.Macbeth, i. 7.

We’d jump the life to come. But, in these cases, / we still have judgment here; that we but teach / Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return / To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice / Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice / To our own lips.Macbeth, i. 7.

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece. / Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence / The life o’ the building.Macbeth, ii. 1.

Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell.Macbeth, ii. 1.

Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.Macbeth, ii. 1.

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath give.Macbeth, ii. 1.

I am afraid to think what I have done; / Look on’t again I dare not.Macbeth, ii. 2.

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, ii. 2.

Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more!Macbeth, ii. 2.

Sleep no more, / Macbeth does murder sleep.Macbeth, ii. 2.

Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave 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, ii. 2.

The attempt, and not the deed, / Confounds us.Macbeth, ii. 2.

The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures.Macbeth, ii. 2.

To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself.Macbeth, ii. 2.

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.Macbeth, ii. 2.

All is but toys.Macbeth, ii. 3.

In the great hand of God I stand.Macbeth, ii. 3.

Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, / And look on death itself.Macbeth, ii. 3.

The labour we delight in physics pain.Macbeth, ii. 3.

“We are men, my liege.”— / Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men.Macbeth, iii. 1.

In the catalogue ye go for men.Macbeth, iii. 1.

To be thus is nothing; / But to be safely thus.Macbeth, iii. 1.

After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.Macbeth, iii. 2.

Downy sleep, death’s counterfeit.Macbeth, iii. 2.

Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.Macbeth, iii. 2.

Things without remedy should be without regard; what is done, is done.Macbeth, iii. 2.

Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison, / Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing / Can touch him further.Macbeth, iii. 2.

We have scotch’d the snake, but not killed it.Macbeth, iii. 2.

You have scotched the snake, not killed him.Macbeth, iii. 2.

Cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d.Macbeth, iii. 4.

Can such things be, / And overcome us like a summer’s cloud, / Without our special wonder?Macbeth, iii. 4.

Good digestion wait on appetite, / And health on both.Macbeth, iii. 4.

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood; / Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak.Macbeth, iii. 4.

No speculation in those eyes / Which thou dost glare with!Macbeth, iii. 4.

Now, good digestion wait on appetite, / And health on both.Macbeth, iii. 4.

Stand not upon the order of your going, / But go at once.Macbeth, iii. 4.

The time has been / That when the brains were out the man should die, / And there an end.Macbeth, iii. 4.

What man dare, I dare.Macbeth, iii. 4.

Security, / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy.Macbeth, iii. 5.

Double, double, toil and trouble, / Fire burn, and caldron bubble.Macbeth, iv. 1.

I’ll make assurance doubly sure, / And take a bond of fate.Macbeth, iv. 1.

The flighty purpose never is o’ertook, / Unless the deed go with it.Macbeth, iv. 1.

When our actions do not, / Our fears do make us traitors.Macbeth, iv. 1.

The night is long that never finds the day.Macbeth, iv. 2.

The poor wren, / The most diminutive of birds, will fight, / Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.Macbeth, iv. 2.

Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward / To what they were before.Macbeth, iv. 2.

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.Macbeth, iv. 3.

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak, / Whispers the o’erfraught heart, and bids it break.Macbeth, iv. 3.

Receive what cheer you may; / The night is long that never finds the day.Macbeth, iv. 3.

The grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.Macbeth, iv. 3.

All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.Macbeth, v. 1.

Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds / To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.Macbeth, v. 1.

What’s done cannot be undone.Macbeth, v. 1.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d, / 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?Macbeth, v. 3.

Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath, / Which the poor heart would fain deny, but dare not.Macbeth, v. 3.

I would applaud thee to the very echo, that should applaud again.Macbeth, v. 3.

My way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf; / And that which should accompany old age, / As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have; but in their stead, / Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath / Which the poor heart would fain deny, but dare not.Macbeth, v. 3.

Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.Macbeth, v. 3.

Blow, wind! come, wrack! / At least we’ll die with harness on our back.Macbeth, v. 5.

Full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.Macbeth, v. 5.

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, v. 5.

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 / To dusty death.Macbeth, v. 5.

I have no words, / My voice is in my sword.Macbeth, v. 7.

Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill.Hamlet, i. 1.

The chariest maid is prodigal enough / If she unmask her beauty to the moon.Hamlet, i. 1.

The cock, that is the trumpet of the morn, / Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat / Awake the god of day.Hamlet, i. 1.

This bodes some strange eruption to our state.Hamlet, i. 1.

A beast that wants discourse of reason.Hamlet, i. 2.

A countenance more in sorrow than in anger.Hamlet, i. 2.

A little more than kin, and less than kind.Hamlet, i. 2.

All that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity.Hamlet, i. 2.

Foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.Hamlet, i. 2.

Frailty, thy name is woman.Hamlet, i. 2.

He was a man, take him for all in all, / I shall not look upon his like again.Hamlet, i. 2.

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world.Hamlet, i. 2.

Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother, / That he might not beteem the winds of heaven / Visit her face too roughly.Hamlet, i. 2.

I have that within which passeth show; / These but the trappings and the suits of woe.Hamlet, i. 2.

Like Niobe, all tears.Hamlet, i. 2.

Oh, 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.Hamlet, i. 2.

Seems, madam! nay, it is; I know not “seems.” / ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, / Nor customary suits of solemn black, / Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, / No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, / Nor the dejected ’haviour of the visage, / Together with all forms, modes, shows of grief, / That can denote truly; these, indeed, seem, / For they are actions that a man can play: / But I have that within, which passeth show; / These but the trappings and the suits of woe.Hamlet, i. 2.

To persevér / In obstinate condolement, is a course / Of impious stubbornness; ’tis unmanly grief: / It shows a will most incorrect to heaven.Hamlet, i. 2.

Beware / Of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in, / Bear ’t that the opposed may beware of thee.Hamlet, i. 3.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, / But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy; / For the apparel oft proclaims the man.Hamlet, i. 3.

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, / Whilst, like a puffed and reckless libertine, / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, / And recks not his own rede.Hamlet, i. 3.

For loan oft loses both itself and friend.Hamlet, i. 3.

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; / Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.Hamlet, i. 3.

Give thy thoughts no tongue, / Nor any unproportioned thought his act. / Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. / The 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.Hamlet, i. 3.

I do know, / When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul / Lends the tongue vows.Hamlet, i. 3.

Keep you in the rear of your affection, / Out of the shot and danger of desire.Hamlet, i. 3.

Loan oft loses both itself and friend.Hamlet, i. 3.

Nature, crescent, does not grow alone / In thews and bulk; but, as this temple waxes, / The inward service of the mind and soul / Grows wide withal.Hamlet, i. 3.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be; / For loan oft loses both itself and friend.Hamlet, i. 3.

Rich, not gaudy.Hamlet, i. 3.

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.Hamlet, i. 3.

The apparel oft proclaims the man.Hamlet, i. 3.

The canker galls the infants of the spring / Too oft before their buttons are disclosed, / And in the morn and liquid dew of youth / Contagious blastments are most imminent.Hamlet, i. 3.

The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.Hamlet, i. 3.

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, i. 3.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.Hamlet, i. 3.

When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul / Lends the tongue vows.Hamlet, i. 3.

Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.Hamlet, i. 3.

A custom / More honoured in the breach than the observance.Hamlet, i. 4.

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 porcupine.Hamlet, i. 4.

It is a custom / More honoured in the breach than the observance.Hamlet, i. 4.

My fate cries out, / And makes each petty artery in this body / As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve.Hamlet, i. 4.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.Hamlet, i. 4.

Why, what should be the fear? / I do not set my life at a pin’s fee; / And for my soul, what can it do to that, / Being a thing immortal as itself?Hamlet, i. 4.

A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain.Hamlet, i. 5.

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, / Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d; / No reckoning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head.Hamlet, i. 5.

Every man hath business and desire, / Such as it is.Hamlet, i. 5.

Leave her to heaven, / And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, / To prick and sting her.Hamlet, i. 5.

No reckoning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head.Hamlet, i. 5.

O my prophetic soul! mine uncle.Hamlet, i. 5.

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.Hamlet, i. 5.

The time is out of joint; O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right.Hamlet, i. 5.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.Hamlet, i. 5.

There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave / To tell us this.Hamlet, i. 5.

Breathe his faults so quaintly, / That they may seem the taints of liberty; / The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind.Hamlet, ii. 1.

Ay, sir, to be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of two thousand.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Caviare to the general.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Doubt thou the stars are fire; / Doubt that the sun doth move; / Doubt truth to be a liar; / But never doubt I love.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.Hamlet, ii. 2.

For murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Happy in that we are not over-happy; / On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.Hamlet, ii. 2.

I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality, that it is but a shadow’s shadow.Hamlet, ii. 2.

It offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb show and noise.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Look to the players;… / They are the abstract and brief chroniclers of the times.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.Hamlet, ii. 2.

More matter with less art.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.Hamlet, ii. 2.

That he is mad ’tis true; ’tis true, ’tis pity; / And pity ’tis ’tis true.Hamlet, ii. 2.

The devil hath power / To assume a pleasing shape.Hamlet, ii. 2.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.Hamlet, ii. 2.

To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.Hamlet, ii. 2.

Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity; the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.Hamlet, ii. 2.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a God!Hamlet, ii. 2.

What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?Hamlet, ii. 2.

’Tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wished.Hamlet, iii. 1.

’Tis too much proved that, with devotion’s visage / And pious action, we do sugar o’er / The devil himself.Hamlet, iii. 1.

Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.Hamlet, iii. 1.

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.Hamlet, iii. 1.

Get thee to a nunnery!Hamlet, iii. 1.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and you nickname God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.Hamlet, iii. 1.

Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go.Hamlet, iii. 1.

Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered.Hamlet, iii. 1.

O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! / The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword; / The expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, / The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!Hamlet, iii. 1.

Rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of.Hamlet, iii. 1.

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.Hamlet, iii. 1.

The dread of something after death, / The undiscovered 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, iii. 1.

The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / The observed of all observers.Hamlet, iii. 1.

The insolence of office.Hamlet, iii. 1.

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns.Hamlet, iii. 1.

There are more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.Hamlet, iii. 1.

Thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.Hamlet, iii. 1.

To be, or not to be, that is the question; / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The stings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles, / And, by opposing, end them.Hamlet, iii. 1.

To die, to sleep; / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heartache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wished.Hamlet, iii. 1.

To die, to sleep; / No more! 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, iii. 1.

To the noble mind / Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.Hamlet, iii. 1.

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, iii. 1.

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, iii. 1.

With devotion’s visage / And pious action we do sugar over / The devil himself.Hamlet, iii. 1.

’Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Brevity is the soul of wit.Hamlet, iii. 2.

By-and-by is easily said.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, you cannot play on me.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Give me that man / Who is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of hearts.Hamlet, iii. 2.

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.Hamlet, iii. 2.

I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well; they imitated humanity so abominably.Hamlet, iii. 2.

I will speak daggers to her, but use none.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Let me be cruel, not unnatural; / I will speak daggers to her, but use none. / My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, / Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune, and harsh, / That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstacy: O, woe is me, / To have seen what I have seen, see what I see.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Our wills and fates do so contrary run, / That our devices still are overthrown; / Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.Hamlet, iii. 2.

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, iii. 2.

They are not a pipe for fortune’s finger, / To sound what stop she please.Hamlet, iii. 2.

They fool me to the top of my bent.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.Hamlet, iii. 2.

To hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Try what repentance can; what can it not? Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?Hamlet, iii. 2.

Very like a whale.Hamlet, iii. 2.

What we do determine oft we break, / Purpose is but the slave to memory.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Who in want a hollow friend doth try, / Directly seasons him his enemy.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Why should the poor be flatter’d? / No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, / And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee, / Where thrift may follow fawning.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Woman’s fear and love hold quantity; / In neither aught, or in extremity.Hamlet, iii. 2.

’Tis not so above: / There is no shuffling; there the action lies / In its true nature.Hamlet, iii. 3.

My offence is rank; it smells to heaven.Hamlet, iii. 3.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; / Words, without thoughts, never to heaven go.Hamlet, iii. 3.

Whereto serves mercy, / But to confront the visage of offence? / And what’s in prayer, but this twofold force, / To be forestalled ere we come to fall, / Or pardon’d, being down? Then I’ll look up.Hamlet, iii. 3.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.Hamlet, iii. 3.

A combination and a form, indeed / Where every god did seem to set his seal / To give the world assurance of a man.Hamlet, iii. 4.

A king of shreds and patches.Hamlet, iii. 4.

An eye like Mars, to threaten or command.Hamlet, iii. 4.

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.Hamlet, iii. 4.

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.Hamlet, iii. 4.

Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.Hamlet, iii. 4.

Confess yourself to Heaven; / Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come; / And do not spread the compost on the weeds, / To make them ranker.Hamlet, iii. 4.

False as dicers’ oaths.Hamlet, iii. 4.

For love of grace, / Lay not the flattering unction to your soul / That not your trespass but my madness speaks.Hamlet, iii. 4.

For use almost can change the stamp of Nature, / And either curb the devil or throw him out / With wondrous potency.Hamlet, iii. 4.

I must be cruel, only to be kind.Hamlet, iii. 4.

Lay not that flattering unction to your soul.Hamlet, iii. 4.

My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time, / And makes as healthful music.Hamlet, iii. 4.

Save me, and hover o’er me with your wings, / You heavenly guards.Hamlet, iii. 4.

This is the very coinage of your brain; / This bodiless creation ecstasy / Is very cunning in.Hamlet, iii. 4.

Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper / Sprinkle cool patience.Hamlet, iii. 4.

Use almost can change the stamp of nature, / And either curb the devil, or throw him out.Hamlet, iii. 4.

A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.Hamlet, iv. 2.

Diseases, desperate grown, / By desperate appliance are relieved, / Or not at all.Hamlet, iv. 3.

Greatly to find quarrel in a straw, / When honour’s at the stake.Hamlet, iv. 4.

Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument, / But greatly to find quarrel in a straw / When honour’s at the stake.Hamlet, iv. 4.

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, iv. 4.

What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time, / Be but to sleep, and feed? A beast, no more.Hamlet, iv. 4.

What is man, / If his chief good, and market of his time, / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no man.Hamlet, iv. 4.

For my means, I’ll husband them so well, / They shall go far with little.Hamlet, iv. 5.

Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.Hamlet, iv. 5.

There’s such divinity doth hedge a king, / That treason can but peep to what it would.Hamlet, iv. 5.

This nothing’s more than matter.Hamlet, iv. 5.

We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.Hamlet, iv. 5.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, / But in battalions.Hamlet, iv. 5.

For youth no less becomes / The light and careless livery that it wears, / Than settled age his sables and his weeds, / Importing health and graveness.Hamlet, iv. 7.

One woe doth tread upon another’s heel, / So fast they follow.Hamlet, iv. 7.

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’s sigh, / That hurts by easing.Hamlet, iv. 7.

You must not think / That we are made of stuff so flat and dull, / That we can let our beard be shook with danger, / And think it pastime.Hamlet, iv. 7.

Youth no less becomes / The light and careless livery that it wears, / Than settled age his sables and his weeds, / Importing health and graveness.Hamlet, iv. 7.

To what base uses we may return, Horatio!Hamlet, v, 1.

Imperious Cæsar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.Hamlet, v. 1.

Let Hercules himself do what he may, / The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.Hamlet, v. 1.

The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.Hamlet, v. 1.

There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.Hamlet, v. 1.

The readiness is all.Hamlet, v. 2.

The rest is silence.Hamlet, v. 2.

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them as we will.Hamlet, v. 2.

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.Hamlet, v. 2.

This fell sergeant, death, / Is strict in his arrest.Hamlet, v. 2.

Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating.Hamlet, v. i.

Although the last, not least.King Lear, i. 1.

I want that glib and oily art, / To speak and purpose not; since what I well intend, / I’ll do ’t before I speak.King Lear, i. 1.

Love’s not love / When it is mingled with regards that stand / Aloof from the entire point.King Lear, i. 1.

Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound / Reverbs no hollowness.King Lear, i. 1.

Those are not empty-hearted whose low sound / Reverbs no hollowness.King Lear, i. 1.

Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides: / Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.King Lear, i. 1.

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound.King Lear, i. 2.

Have more than thou showest; / Speak less than thou knowest; / Lend less than thou owest; / Learn more than thou trowest; / Set less than thou throwest.King Lear, i. 4.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!King Lear, i. 4.

Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend, / More hideous, when thou show’st thee in a child, / Than the sea-monster.King Lear, i. 4.

Let me still take away the harms I fear, / Not fear still to be taken.King Lear, i. 4.

Truth’s a dog that must to kennel; he must be whipped out when the Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink.King Lear, i. 4.

Well, you may fear too far.— / Safer than trust too far.King Lear, i. 4.

Woe, that too late repents.King Lear, i. 4.

Down, thou climbing sorrow; / Thy element’s below.King Lear, ii. 4.

Fathers that wear rags / Do make their children blind; / But fathers that wear bags / Do make their children kind.King Lear, ii. 4.

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.King Lear, ii. 4.

Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of her confine.King Lear, ii. 4.

To wilful men / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters.King Lear, ii. 4.

A man / More sinn’d against than sinning.King Lear, iii. 2.

For the rain it raineth every day.King Lear, iii. 2.

I am a man / More sinned against than sinning.King Lear, iii. 2.

More sinn’d against than sinning.King Lear, iii. 2.

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, / How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, / Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you / From seasons such as these? O I have ta’en / Too little care of this!King Lear, iii. 2.

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world! / Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once, / That make ungrateful man!King Lear, iii. 2.

Learned Theban.King Lear, iii. 4.

Loop’d and window’d raggedness.King Lear, iii. 4.

O that way madness lies.King Lear, iii. 4.

Obey thy parents; keep thy word justly; swear not; set not thy sweet heart on proud array.King Lear, iii. 4.

Take physic, pomp; / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel; / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, / And show the heavens more just.King Lear, iii. 4.

When the mind’s free, the body’s delicate.King Lear, iii. 4.

Where the greater malady is fix’d, / The lesser is scarce felt.King Lear, iii. 4.

We our betters see bearing our woes, / We scarcely think our miseries our foes.King Lear, iii. 6.

When we our betters see bearing our woes, / We scarcely think our miseries our foes.King Lear, iii. 6.

Who is’t can say, I’m at the worst? / I’m worse than ere I was, / And worse I may be yet; the worst is not, / So long as we can say, / This is the worst.King Lear, iv. 1.

Yet better thus, and known to be contemn’d, / Than still contemn’d and flatter’d.King Lear, iv. 1.

Ay, every inch a king.King Lear, iv. 6.

Every inch a king.King Lear, iv. 6.

Fool of fortune.King Lear, iv. 6.

Nature’s above art.King Lear, iv. 6.

O ruin’d piece of nature! This great world / Shall so wear out to nought.King Lear, iv. 6.

Plate sin with gold, / And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; / Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it.King Lear, iv. 6.

They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie: I am not ague-proof.King Lear, iv. 6.

Through tatter’d clothes small vices do appear; / Robes and furr’d gowns hide all.King Lear, iv. 6.

Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all.King Lear, v. 2.

Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low—an excellent thing in woman.King Lear, v. 3.

Jesters do oft prove prophets.King Lear, v. 3.

Men are as the time is.King Lear, v. 3.

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to scourge us.King Lear, v. 3.

We cannot all be masters, nor all masters / Cannot be truly follow’d.King Lear, v. 3.

’Tis the curse of service; preferment goes by letter and affection, not by the old gradation where each second stood heir to the first.Othello, i. 1.

But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at.Othello, i. 1.

I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at.Othello, i. 1.

’Twas strange, ’twas passing strange, / ’Twas pitiful; ’twas wondrous pitiful.Othello, i. 3.

I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver / Of my whole course of love.Othello, i. 3.

Little of this great world can I speak, / More than pertains to feats of broil and battle; / And, therefore, little shall I grace my cause / In speaking for myself. Yet by your gracious patience, / I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver / Of my whole course of love.Othello, i. 3.

Moving accidents by flood and field.Othello, i. 3.

Put money in thy purse.Othello, i. 3.

Rude am I in my speech, / And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace.Othello, i. 3.

She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them. / This only is the witchcraft I have used.Othello, i. 3.

The robb’d that smiles, steals something from the thief.Othello, i. 3.

The very head and front of my offending / Hath this extent, no more.Othello, i. 3.

To mourn a mischief that is past and gone, / Is the next way to draw new mischief on.Othello, i. 3.

When remedies are past, the griefs are ended / By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended.Othello, i. 3.

Base men, being in love, have then a nobility in their natures more than is native to them.Othello, ii. 1.

For I am nothing if not critical.Othello, ii. 1.

I am nothing if not critical.Othello, ii. 1.

Knavery’s plain face is never seen till used.Othello, ii. 1.

O most lame and impotent conclusion!Othello, ii. 1.

Dull not device by coldness and delay.Othello, ii. 3.

Every inordinate cup is unbless’d, and the ingredient is a devil.Othello, ii. 3.

Good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well used.Othello, ii. 3.

Heaven’s above all; and there be souls that must be saved, and there be souls that must not be saved.Othello, ii. 3.

How poor are they that have not patience! / What wound did ever heal but by degrees?Othello, ii. 3.

Let’s teach ourselves that honourable stop, not to out-sport discretion.Othello, ii. 3.

Men are men; the best sometimes forget.Othello, ii. 3.

Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.Othello, ii. 3.

Reputation is an idle and false imposition, oft got without merit, and lost without deserving; you have lost no reputation at all unless you repute yourself such a loser.Othello, ii. 3.

Reputation, reputation, reputation! O I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.Othello, ii. 3.

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.Othello, iii. 2.

Jealousy: / It is the green-eyed monster that doth mock / The meat it feeds on.Othello, iii. 2.

Beware, my lord, of jealousy; / It is the green-eyed monster that doth mock / The meat it feeds on.Othello, iii. 3.

But O what damned minutes tells he o’er, / Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strongly loves?Othello, iii. 3.

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul, / But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again.Othello, iii. 3.

Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! / Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars / That make ambition virtue! oh, farewell! / Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump, / The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, / The royal banner, and all quality, / Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!Othello, iii. 3.

He that fliches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him, / And makes me poor indeed.Othello, iii. 3.

He that is robb’d, not wanting what is stolen, / Let him not know ’t, and he’s not robb’d at all.Othello, iii. 3.

Men should be what they seem; / Or those that be not, would they might seem none.Othello, iii. 3.

Oh, what damned minutes tells he o’er, / Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet soundly loves.Othello, iii. 3.

Othello’s occupation’s gone!Othello, iii. 3.

Poor and content is rich and rich enough; / But riches fineless is as poor as winter / To him that ever fears he shall be poor.Othello, iii. 3.

Riches fineless is as poor as winter / To him that ever fears he shall be poor.Othello, iii. 3.

Take note, take note, O world, / To be direct and honest is not safe.Othello, iii. 3.

To be once in doubt is once to be resolved.Othello, iii. 3.

Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ.Othello, iii. 3.

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.Othello, iii. 3.

For let our finger ache, and it endues / Our other healthful members ev’n to that sense / Of pain.Othello, iii. 4.

Let our finger ache, and it endues / Our other healthful members ev’n to that sense / Of pain.Othello, iii. 4.

Men’s natures wrangle with inferior things, / Though great ones are their object.Othello, iii. 4.

They laugh that win.Othello, iv. 2.

Guiltiness will speak, though tongues were out of use.Othello, v. 1.

Being done, / There is no pause.Othello, v. 2.

Have you prayed to-night, Desdemona?Othello, v. 2.

Nothing extenuate, / Nor set down aught in malice; then must you speak / Of one, that loved not wisely, but too well; / … of one, whose hand, / Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe.Othello, v. 2.

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, / Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak / Of one who loved not wisely but too well.Othello, v. 2.

That death’s unnatural that kills for loving.Othello, v. 2.

Why should honour outlive honesty?Othello, v. 2.

There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.Ant. and Cleop., i. 1.

In time we hate that which we often fear.Ant. and Cleop., i. 3.

The ebb’d man, ne’er loved till ne’er worth love, / Comes dear’d by being lack’d.Ant. and Cleop., i. 4.

We, ignorant of ourselves, / Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers / Deny us for our good; so find we profit / By losing of our prayers.Ant. and Cleop., ii. 1.

Her own person, / It beggar’d all description.Ant. and Cleop., ii. 2.

Give to a gracious message / An host of tongues; but let ill tidings tell / Themselves when they be felt.Ant. and Cleop., ii. 5.

I do not like “but yet,” it does allay / The good precedence; fie upon “but yet:” / “But yet” is as a jailer to bring forth / Some monstrous malefactor.Ant. and Cleop., ii. 5.

If I lose mine honour, I lose myself.Ant. and Cleop., iii. 4.

Celerity is never more admired / Than by the negligent.Ant. and Cleop., iii. 7.

He that can endure / To follow with allegiance a fall’n lord, / Does conquer him that did his master conquer, / And earns a place i’ the story.Ant. and Cleop., iii. 11.

Wisdom and Fortune combating together, / If that the former dare but what he can, / No chance may shake it.Ant. and Cleop., iii. 11.

Never anger / Made good guard for itself.Ant. and Cleop., iv. 1.

To business that we love we rise betime, / And go to ’t with delight.Ant. and Cleop., iv. 4.

For his bounty, / There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas, / That grew the more by reaping.Ant. and Cleop., v. 2.

Doubting things go ill often hurts more / Than to be sure they do.Cymbeline, i. 7.

The crickets sing, and man’s o’er-laboured sense / Repairs itself by rest.Cymbeline, ii. 2.

Weariness / Can snore upon the flint, when resty sloth / Finds the down pillow hard.Cymbeline, ii. 6.

Then was I as a tree / Whose boughs did bend with fruit; but, in one night, / A storm, or robbery, call it what you will, / Shook down my mellow hangings, nay, my leaves, / And left me bare to weather.Cymbeline, iii. 3.

Men’s vows are women’s traitors.Cymbeline, iii. 4.

Slander, / Whose edge is sharper than the sword, whose tongue / Out-venoms all the worms of Nile, whose breath / Rides on the parting winds, and doth belie / All corners of the world.Cymbeline, iii. 4.

Hardness ever of hardiness is mother.Cymbeline, iii. 6.

Plenty, and peace, breeds cowards; hardness ever of hardiness is mother.Cymbeline, iii. 6.

To lapse in fulness / Is sorer than to lie for need; and falsehood / Is worse in kings than beggars.Cymbeline, iii. 6.

Clay and clay differs in dignity, / Whose dust is both alike.Cymbeline, iv. 2.

Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base; / Nature hath meal and bran; contempt and grace.Cymbeline, iv. 2.

Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.Cymbeline, iv. 2.

Great griefs medicine the less.Cymbeline, iv. 2.

Love’s reasons without reason.Cymbeline, iv. 2.

Society is no comfort to one not sociable.Cymbeline, iv. 2.

The breach of custom / Is breach of all.Cymbeline, iv. 2.

Triumphs for nothing and lamenting toys, / Is jollity for apes and grief for boys.Cymbeline, iv. 2.

Fortune brings in some boats that are ill-steered.Cymbeline, iv. 3.

You must either be directed by some that take upon them to know, or take upon yourself that which I am sure you do not know, or jump the after-inquiry on your own peril.Cymbeline, v. 4.

Few love to hear the sins they love to act.Pericles, i. 1.

Flattery is the bellows blows up sin; / The thing the which is flattered, but a spark, / To which that blast gives heat and stronger glowing; / Whereas reproof, obedient and in order, / Fits kings, as they are men, for they may err.Pericles, i. 2.

It is time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.Pericles, i. 2.

Fishes live in the sea,… as men do on land—the great ones eat up the little ones.Pericles, ii. 1.

The rough seas that spare not any man.Pericles, ii. 1.

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.Pericles, ii. 3.

No visor does become black villany / So well as soft and tender flattery.Pericles, iv. 4.

Music of the spheres.Pericles, v. 1.

Unstained thoughts do seldom dream on evil; / Birds never limed no secret bushes fear.Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece.

Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week? / Or sells eternity to get a toy?Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece.

Youth is full of sport, age’s breath is short; / Youth is nimble, age is lame; / Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold; / Youth is wild, and age is tame.Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.Shakespeare, Sonnet LV.

A smile re-cures the wounding of a frown.Shakespeare.

All orators are dumb when beauty pleadeth.Shakespeare.

Beauty blemished once, for ever’s lost.Shakespeare.

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good.Shakespeare.

Crabbed age and youth / Cannot live together.Shakespeare.

Dismiss your vows, your feigned tears, your flattery; / For where a heart is hard, they make no battery.Shakespeare.

Each present joy or sorrow seems the chief.Shakespeare.

Even so my sun one early morn did shine, / With all triumphant splendour on my brow; / But out alack! it was but one hour mine.Shakespeare.

For greatest scandal waits on greatest state.Shakespeare.

For he being dead, with him is beauty slain, / And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again.Shakespeare.

Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets; / But gold that’s put to use, more gold begets.Shakespeare.

Gnats are unnoticed whereso’er they fly, / But eagles gazed upon by every eye.Shakespeare.

Gold that is put to use more gold begets.Shakespeare.

Gold, worse poison to men’s souls, / Doing more murder in this loathsome world, / Than these poor compounds that thou may’st not sell.Shakespeare.

Greatest scandal waits on greatest state.Shakespeare.

Grief best is pleased with grief’s society.Shakespeare.

Have you not heard it said full oft, / A woman’s nay doth stand for nought?Shakespeare.

He is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man.Shakespeare.

It is one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.Shakespeare.

Lawless are they that make their wills their law.Shakespeare.

Loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.Shakespeare.

Looks kill love, and love by looks reviveth.Shakespeare.

Love is a spirit all compact of fire; / Not gross to sink, but light and will aspire.Shakespeare.

Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds.Shakespeare.

Misery is trodden down by many, / And, being low, never relieved by any.Shakespeare.

Neither rhyme nor reason.Shakespeare.

Oppose not rage while rage is in its force, but give it way awhile and let it waste.Shakespeare.

Pain pays the income of each precious thing.Shakespeare.

Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud; / Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun.Shakespeare.

Sad souls are slain in merry company. / Grief best is pleased with grief’s society; / True sorrow then is feelingly sufficed / When with like semblance it is sympathised.Shakespeare.

Slander’s mark was ever yet the fair; / … A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.Shakespeare.

So thou be good, slander doth but approve / Thy worth the greater.Shakespeare.

Soft pity enters at an iron gate.Shakespeare.

Some falls are means the happier to rise.Shakespeare.

Sorrow, like a heavy-hanging bell, once set on ringing, with his own strength goes; then little strength rings out the doleful knell.Shakespeare.

The argument all bare is of more worth / Than when it hath my added praise beside.Shakespeare.

The painful warrior famousèd for fight, / After a thousand victories, once foil’d, / Is from the books of honour razèd quite, / And all the rest forgot for which he toil’d.Shakespeare.

The strongest castle, tower, and town, / The golden bullet beats it down.Shakespeare.

Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.Shakespeare.

What a hell of witchcraft lies in the small orb of one particular tear!Shakespeare.

Where love reigns, disturbing jealousy doth call himself affection’s sentinel.Shakespeare.

Who soars too near the sun with golden wings melts them.Shakespeare.

Why so large cost, having so short a lease, / Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?Shakespeare.

Will is deaf, and hears no heedful friends.Shakespeare.