Some of my favourite quotations from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets (please feel free to add yours):
When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in batallions.
Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
MacBeth, Act V, Scene V
One that loved not wisely but too well.
Othello, Act V, Scene II
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet XVIII
This above all: to thine own self be true.
Hamlet, Act I, Scene III
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
Blow, blow, thou winter wind!
Thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.
As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII
For ever and a day.
As You Like It, Act IV, Scene I
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
As You Like It, Act V, Scene I
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 we not revenge?"
The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene I
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene I
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 Caesar, Act II, Scene II
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sonnet CXVI
[This message has been edited by Nadia_H (edited May 06, 2002).]