Quotes to inspire and reflect

The bloody book of law You shall yourself read in the bitter letter After your own sense.

Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.

The wealthy curled darlings of our nation.

But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at.

An old black ram Is tupping your white ewe.

In following him, I follow but myself.

And when he’s old, cashier’d.

The bookish theoric.

We cannot all be masters.

A fellow almost damn’d in a fair wife.

Horribly stuff’d with epithets of war.

What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.

They say best men are molded out of faults, And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little bad.

Truth is truth To the end of reckoning.

Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure, Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.

We would, and we would not.

A forted residence ’gainst the tooth of time And razure of oblivion.

Music oft hath such a charm To make bad good, and good provoke to harm.

Take, O take those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn; And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn: But my kisses bring again, bring again, Seals of love, but seal’d in vain, seal’d in vain. 43

O, what may man within him hide, Though angel on the outward side!

He, who the sword of heaven will bear Should be as holy as severe.

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.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison’d in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world.

The cunning livery of hell.

If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in my arms.

Thou hast nor youth nor age; But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep, Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich, Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty, To make thy riches pleasant.

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.

Be absolute for death.

A breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences.

The miserable have no other medicine But only hope.

It oft falls out, To have what we would have, we speak not what we mean.

But man, proud man, Drest 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.

That in the captain’s but a choleric word, Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.

O! it is excellent To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.

The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept.

Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it?

No ceremony that to great ones ’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.

This will last out a night in Russia, When nights are longest there.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

The jury, passing on the prisoner’s life, May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two Guiltier than him they try.

We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape, till custom make it Their perch and not their terror.

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

A man whose blood Is very snow-broth; one who never feels The wanton stings and motions of the sense.

And liberty plucks justice by the nose.

I hold you as a thing ensky’d and sainted.

Love that comes too late, Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried.

All impediments in fancy’s course Are motives of more fancy.

The inaudible and noiseless foot of time.