William Shakespeare Quotes

The dreadful dead of dark midnight.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poetAre of imagination all compact:One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet's penTurns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.

What, all so soon asleep! I wish mine eyesWould, with themselves, shut up my thoughts...

Men are April when they woo December when they wed.

Are you good men and true?

I will deny thee nothing: Whereon, I do beseech thee, grant me this, To leave me but a little to myself.

Refrain to-night;And that shall lend a kind of easinessTo the next abstinence, the next more easy;For use almost can change the stamp of nature,And either master the devil or throw him outWith wondrous potency.

Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.

Blow wind and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow!

GLOUCESTERNow, good sir, what are you?EDGARA most poor man made tame to fortune's blows,Who by the art of known and feeling sorrowsAm pregnant to good pity.

Get you gone, you dwarf,You minimus of hindering knotgrass made,You bead, you acorn!

Dispute not with her: she is lunatic.

When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, "Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends"(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." (III,ii, 371-380)

Fit to govern? No, not fit to live.

O shame! Where is they blush?

In thy foul throat thou liest.

O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping.

All dark and comfortless.

I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.

Thou, my slave,As thou report'st thyself, was then her servant,And for thou wast a spirit too delicateTo act her earthy and abhorred commands,Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,By help of her more potent ministersAnd in her most unmitigable rage,Into a cloven pine, within which riftImprisoned thou didst painfully remainA dozen years; within which space she diedAnd left thee there, where thou didst vent thy groansAs fast as mill wheels strike.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

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

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord?Or to the dreadful summit of the cliffThat beetles o'er his base into the sea,And there assume some other horrible formWhich might deprive your sovereignty of reasonAnd draw you into madness? Think of it.[The very place puts toys of desperation,Without more motive, into every brainThat looks so many fathoms to the seaAnd hears it roar beneath.]

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

There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of by your philosophy.

Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is! (Act 1, scene 1)

He does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural.

I'll follow this good man, and go with you;And, having sworn truth, ever will be true.

No 'tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door but 'tis enough 'twill serve: ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered I warrant for this world.

It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.

I am dying Egypt dying.

Now go with me and with this holy manInto the chantry by: there, before him,And underneath that consecrated roof,Plight me the full assurance of your faith.

Don't waste your love on somebody, who doesn't value it.

Come what come may, time and the hour run through the roughest day.

And shake the yoke of inauspicious starsFrom this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!

By this reckoning he is more a shrew than she.

Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed. His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!

Love me or hate me, both are in my favour. If you love me, I'll always be in your heart... If you hate me, I'll always be in your mind.

Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight.Mercutio: And so did I.Romeo: Well, what was yours?Mercutio: That dreamers often lie.

But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at I am not what I am.

The miserable have no medicine but hope.

The art of our necessities is strangeThat can make vile things precious.

Alas, that love, whose view is muffled still,Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will!Where shall we dine? O me! What fray was here?Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!O any thing, of nothing first create!O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!This love feel I, that feel no love in this.Dost thou not laugh?

Uncertain way of gain. But I am inSo far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.

Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.

O gentle Romeo If thou dost love pronounce it faithfully. Or if thou think'st I am too quickly won I'll frown and be perverse and say thee nay So thou wilt woo: but else not for the world.

I rather would entreat thy companyTo see the wonders of the world abroadThan, living dully sluggardiz'd at home,Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.

Conscience does make cowards of us all.

I do believe you think what now you speak,But what we do determine oft we break.Purpose is but the slave to memory,Of violent birth, but poor validity,Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree,But fall, unshaken, when they mellow be.Most necessary ’tis that we forgetTo pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt.What to ourselves in passion we propose,The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.

Frailty, thy name is woman!—A little month, or ere those shoes were oldWith which she follow'd my poor father's body,Like Niobe, all tears:—

His jest shall savour but a shallow wit, when thousands more weep than did laugh it.

There's some ill planet reigns:I must be patient till the heavens lookWith an aspect more favourable. Good my lords,I am not prone to weeping, as our sexCommonly are; the want of which vain dewPerchance shall dry your pities: but I haveThat honourable grief lodged here which burnsWorse than tears drown: beseech you all, my lords,With thoughts so qualified as your charitiesShall best instruct you, measure me; and soThe king's will be perform'd!

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,Yet Grace must still look so.

DEMETRIUSRelent, sweet Hermia: and, Lysander, yieldThy crazed title to my certain right.LYSANDERYou have her father's love, Demetrius;Let me have Hermia's: do you marry him.

Alack, when once our grace we have forgot,Nothing goes right; we would and we would not.

So our virtuesLie in the interpretation of the time:And power, unto itself most commendable,Hath not a tomb so evident as a chairTo extol what it hath done.One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.

Glendower: I can call the spirits from the vasty deep.Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;But will they come, when you do call for them?