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Thread: Your FAVORITE quote from Shakespeare!

  1. #31
    Botteur de Pigeons Amlóði's Avatar
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    Here's my attempt to narrow it down to five:

    i. Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in
    the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to
    come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the
    readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't
    to leave betimes, let be. (Hamlet to Horatio)

    ii. Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
    When time is broke and no proportion kept!
    So is it in the music of men's lives.
    And here have I the daintiness of ear
    To cheque time broke in a disorder'd string;
    But for the concord of my state and time
    Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
    I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; ... (Richard in prison)

    iii. Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
    As I foretold you, were all spirits and
    Are melted into air, into thin air:
    And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
    The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
    The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
    Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
    And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
    Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
    As dreams are made on, and our little life
    Is rounded with a sleep. (Prospero after the feast)

    iv. When we are born, we cry that we are come
    To this great stage of fools: ... (Mad Lear to Gloucester) or
    'Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind. (Gloucester to Old Man)

    v. I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;
    Redeeming time when men think least I will. (Prince Hal to his audience)

  2. #32
    I grow, I prosper Jeremiah Jazzz's Avatar
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    'Love's not time's fool'
    -Sonnet #116

    'A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear'
    -Hamlet. Act 4, Scene 2
    I AM THE BOY
    THAT CAN ENJOY
    INVISIBILITY.

  3. #33
    Our wee Olympic swimmer Janine's Avatar
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    This is my favorite too from Hamlet....I always cry in that scene. Amodli, glad that you posted this one; it saved me looking it up. I have some more Shakespeare favorites but will have to look those up online and then post later on. One is "Henry V's" famous soliquey in the night camp. That one goes right to my heart. I also love one by Byron in "Love's Labours Lost." I will have to go hunt for these online...too much typging.

    Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in
    the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to
    come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the
    readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't
    to leave betimes, let be. (Hamlet to Horatio)
    "It's so mysterious, the land of tears."

    Chapter 7, The Little Prince ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  4. #34
    Shakespearean xman's Avatar
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    Good one, Janine. Also from Hamlet this always strikes me:

    I haue of late, but wherefore I knowe not, lost all my mirth,
    forgon all custome of exercises: and indeede it goes so heauily with
    my disposition, that this goodly frame the earth, seemes to mee a
    sterill promontorie, this most excellent Canopie the ayre, looke
    you, this braue orehanging firmament, this maiesticall roofe fret-
    ted with golden fire, why it appeareth nothing to me but a foule
    and pestilent congregation of vapoures. What peece of worke is a
    man, how noble in reason, how infinit in faculties, in forme and
    moouing, how expresse and admirable in action, how like an An-
    gell in apprehension, how like a God: the beautie of the world; the
    paragon of Annimales; and yet to me, what is this Quintessence of
    dust: man delights not me

    X
    He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. ~ Douglas Adams

  5. #35
    Registered User prendrelemick's Avatar
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    Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
    Or close the gap up with our English dead. (Henry V)


    This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
    This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
    This other Eden, demi-paradise;
    This fortress, built by nature for herself,
    Against infection, and the hand of war;
    This happy breed of men, this little world;
    This precious stone set in the silver sea,
    Which serves it in the office of a wall,
    Or as a moat defensive to a house,
    Against the envy of less happier lands;
    This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, (Richard II)

    I must be feeling a bit patriotic tonight!

  6. #36
    The Body in the Library Thespian1975's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Abdiel View Post
    Wow! These quotes are all so wonderful. My question is: is there such a thing as a bad Shakespeare quote? I mean, every line he wrote was stunning, so you can't exactly find anything bad (unless you cut a line off part way: To be or not to....)
    Have you read Henry VI part One? Overall a poor play with a few good bits in it.

  7. #37
    Registered User bree's Avatar
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    Caliban to Prospero

    You taught me language, and my profit on't
    Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
    For learning me your language!

    The Tempest

  8. #38
    Searching for..... amalia1985's Avatar
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    From "Macbeth", 5.5:

    "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."
    None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe that they are free.
    -Goethe

  9. #39
    Registered User kelby_lake's Avatar
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    'The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars. It is in ourselves that we are underlings' (Julius Caeser)
    'It is a tale told by an idiot/Full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing' (Macbeth)

    And probably many more.

  10. #40
    Our wee Olympic swimmer Janine's Avatar
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    i. Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in
    the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to
    come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the
    readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't
    to leave betimes, let be. (Hamlet to Horatio)
    This is my favorite, too!...


    hahah...I see I posted it twice now; well you know how much I love this line since I didn't realise I had done so just now; I had to edit this entry.
    "It's so mysterious, the land of tears."

    Chapter 7, The Little Prince ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  11. #41
    ésprit de l’escalier DanielBenoit's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by LadyW View Post
    "There 's daggers in men's smiles".
    Macbeth
    (Act II, Scene III).
    Wow, I missed that one.

    "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
    Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more: it is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing."

    Macbeth Act V Scene V


    "To be, or not to be: that is the question:
    Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
    The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
    And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
    No more; and by a sleep to say we end
    The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
    That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
    Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
    To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
    For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
    When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
    Must give us pause: there's the respect
    That makes calamity of so long life;
    For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
    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? who would fardels bear,
    To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
    But that the dread of something after death,
    The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
    No traveller returns, puzzles the will
    And makes us rather bear those ills we have
    Than fly to others that we know not of?
    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
    And thus the native hue of resolution
    Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
    And enterprises of great pith and moment
    With this regard their currents turn awry,
    And lose the name of action."

    Hamlet Act III Scene I
    (yeah I know, but somebody had to quote what must be quoted)


    "Why, e'en so: and now my Lady Worm's; chapless, and knocked about the mazzard with a sexton's spade: here's fine revolution, an we had the trick to
    see't. Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with 'em? mine ache to think on't."

    Hamlet Act V Scene I


    "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, howabhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
    Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that."

    Hamlet Act V Scene I


    The rest is silence

    Hamlet Act V Scene II


    "What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honor set-to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? no. What is honour? a word. What is that word, honour? air. A trim reckoning!—Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth be hear it? no. Is it insensible, then? yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it: honour is a mere scutcheon:—and so ends my catechism."
    -Falstaff

    Henry IV, Part I Act V Scene I


    "Give me life."
    -Falstaff
    Henry IV, Part I Act V Scene II


    Here's a Shakespeare's heartbreaking Sonnet 66

    Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
    As, to behold desert a beggar born,
    And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
    And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
    And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
    And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
    And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
    And strength by limping sway disabled,
    And art made tongue-tied by authority,
    And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
    And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
    And captive good attending captain ill:
    Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
    Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.


    Also, check out the quote in my signature.
    The Moments of Dominion
    That happen on the Soul
    And leave it with a Discontent
    Too exquisite — to tell —
    -Emily Dickinson
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVW8GCnr9-I
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckGIvr6WVw4

  12. #42
    Aoife Aoife's Avatar
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    ''There was good sport in his making, and the whoreson must be acknowleged''

    owch!

  13. #43
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    That's it! No one's standing up for Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's most underrated plays.

    So, just to show you what you're missing if you haven't read it yet, I'll post these awesome quotes in the hopes that people will give it a chance.

    Arviragus: Are we not brothers?
    Imogen: So man and man should be;
    But clay and clay differs in dignity,
    Whose dust is both alike.
    (Cymbeline 4.2, 2318-2322)

    Imogen: I am ill, but your being by me
    Cannot amend me; society is no comfort
    To one not sociable:
    (Cymbeline 4.2, 2328-2330)

    Cloten. Thou art a robber,
    A law-breaker, a villain: yield thee, thief.
    Guiderius. To who? to thee? What art thou? Have not I
    An arm as big as thine? a heart as big?
    Thy words, I grant, are bigger, for I wear not
    My dagger in my mouth.
    (Cymbeline 4.2, 2415-2422)


    In one of the most touching scenes in all Shakespeare, the protagonist Leonatus thinks that his wife Imogen is cheating on him and orders that his servant, Pisanio, take Imogen somewhere secluded and kill her.

    He writes his instructions in a letter which he gives to Pisanio, except Pisanio doesn't believe that Imogen would ever be unfaithful to his master. So, instead of killing Imogen, Pisanio gives her the letter in which is written the accusation of infidelity and the order to kill her. Imogen is reading the letter by herself as Pisanio watches her expression, and he says:

    Pisanio. What shall I need to draw my sword? the paper
    Hath cut her throat already.
    (Cymbeline 3.4, 1753-1754)

    That gets me every time.

  14. #44
    Card-carrying Medievalist Lokasenna's Avatar
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    Richard III seems a popular choice, and this (I feel) is one of the more overlooked passages. The Duke of Clarence, soon to be murdered, has just suffered a prophetic and halucinatory nightmare:

    CLARENCE

    Methoughts that I had broken from the Tower,
    And was embark'd to cross to Burgundy;
    And, in my company, my brother Gloster;
    Who from my cabin tempted me to walk
    Upon the hatches: thence we look'd toward England,
    And cited up a thousand heavy times,
    During the wars of York and Lancaster,
    That had befall'n us. As we pac'd along
    Upon the giddy footing of the hatches,
    Methought that Gloster stumbled; and, in falling,
    Struck me, that thought to stay him, overboard
    Into the tumbling billows of the main.
    O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown!
    What dreadful noise of waters in my ears!
    What sights of ugly death within my eyes!
    Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
    A thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon;
    Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
    Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
    All scatt'red in the bottom of the sea:
    Some lay in dead men's skulls; and in the holes
    Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept,—
    As 'twere in scorn of eyes,—reflecting gems,
    That woo'd the slimy bottom of the deep,
    And mock'd the dead bones that lay scatter'd by.

    BRAKENBURY.

    Had you such leisure in the time of death
    To gaze upon these secrets of the deep?

    CLARENCE.

    Methought I had; and often did I strive
    To yield the ghost: but still the envious flood
    Stopp'd in my soul, and would not let it forth
    To find the empty, vast, and wandering air;
    But smother'd it within my panting bulk,
    Who almost burst to belch it in the sea.

    BRAKENBURY.

    Awak'd you not in this sore agony?

    CLARENCE.

    No, no, my dream was lengthen'd after life;
    O, then began the tempest to my soul!
    I pass'd, methought, the melancholy flood
    With that grim ferryman which poets write of,
    Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.
    The first that there did greet my stranger soul
    Was my great father-in-law, renowned Warwick;
    Who spake aloud, "What scourge for perjury
    Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?"
    And so he vanish'd: then came wandering by
    A shadow like an Angel, with bright hair
    Dabbled in blood; and he shriek'd out aloud
    "Clarence is come,—false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence,—
    That stabb'd me in the field by Tewksbury;—
    Seize on him, Furies, take him to your torments!"
    With that, methoughts, a legion of foul fiends
    Environ'd me, and howled in mine ears
    Such hideous cries that, with the very noise,
    I trembling wak'd, and for a season after
    Could not believe but that I was in hell,—
    Such terrible impression made my dream.

    The vividness of the imagery is magnificent; as I read it for the first time (and later saw it performed brilliantly by the late Nigel Hawthorne), it drew me powerfully into it, and cemented itself as one of my favourite passages in Shakespeare. I'm particularly attached to the "shadow like an Angel, with bright hair/ Dabbled in blood."
    "I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance. And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity- through him all things fall. Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity!" - Nietzsche

  15. #45
    King of Dreams MorpheusSandman's Avatar
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    This sends chills up my spine every time I read it or hear it spoken:

    Hamlet 3.1, 132-140:

    why wouldst thou be a
    breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest;
    but yet I could accuse me of such things that it
    were better my mother had not borne me: I am very
    proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at
    my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,
    imagination to give them shape, or time to act them
    in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
    between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,
    all; believe none of us.

    There are lots from A Midsummer Night's Dream that I haven't seen mentioned:

    Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
    Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
    More than cool reason ever comprehends.
    The lunatic, the lover and the poet
    Are 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 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.
    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! (5.1, 6-24)

    The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst
    are no worse, if imagination amend them. (5.1, 211-212)
    Last edited by MorpheusSandman; 10-21-2009 at 07:27 PM.
    "As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung

    "To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists

    "I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers

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