Quotes to inspire and reflect

For honor travels in a strait so narrow Where one but goes abreast.

Perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honor bright: to have done, is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery.

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

For to be wise, and love, Exceeds man’s might; that dwells with gods above.

I am giddy, expectation whirls me round. The imaginary relish is so sweet That it enchants my sense.

Modest doubt is call’d The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches To the bottom of the worst.

’Tis mad idolatry To make the service greater than the god.

And in such indexes, although small pricks To their subsequent volumes, there is seen The baby figure of the giant mass Of things to come.

Like a strutting player, whose conceit Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich To hear the wooden dialogue and sound ’Twixt his stretch’d footing and the scaffoldage.

Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark! what discord follows; each thing meets In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe.

Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, a universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce a universal prey, And last eat up himself.

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order.

O! when degree is shaked, Which is the ladder to all high designs, The enterprise is sick.

The sea being smooth, How many shallow bauble boats dare sail Upon her patient breast.

Men prize the thing ungain’d more than it is.

Women are angels, wooing: Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.

The chance of war.

Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together.

Property was thus appall’d, That the self was not the same; Single nature’s double name Neither two nor one was call’d.

O proud death! What feast is toward in thine eternal cell?

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

The rest is silence.

O God! Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me. If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story.

I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.

Report me and my cause aright.

A hit, a very palpable hit.

This fell sergeant, death, Is strict in his arrest.

It did me yeoman’s service.

I once did hold it, as our statists do, A baseness to write fair.

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.

Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew and dog will have his day.

Nay, an thou’lt mouth, I’ll rant as well as thou.

I lov’d Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum.

Though I am not splenetive and rash Yet have I in me something dangerous.

I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid, And not have strew’d thy grave.

A ministering angel shall my sister be.

Sweets to the sweet: farewell!

Lay her i’ the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring!

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

A very riband in the cap of youth.

Nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will.

There’s such divinity doth hedge a king, That treason can but peep to what it would.

We have done but greenly, In hugger-mugger to inter him.

He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf At his heels a stone.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions. 36

How should I your true love know From another one? By his cockle hat and staff, And his sandal shoon. 35

So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.

Some craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on the event.