Quotes to inspire and reflect

Great Caesar fell. O! what a fall was there, my countrymen; Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, Whilst bloody treason flourish’d over us.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

See what a rent the envious Casca made.

But yesterday the word of Caesar might Have stood against the world; now lies he there, And none so poor to do him reverence.

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason.

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept; Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

For Brutus is an honorable man; So are they all, all honorable men.

Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.

O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers; Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of times.

The choice and master spirits of this age.

How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted o’er, In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

O mighty Caesar! dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, Shrunk to this little measure?

Et tu, Brute?

Some to the common pulpits, and cry out, “Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement!”

Speak, hands, for me!

But I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament.

How hard it is for women to keep counsel!

Antony, that revels long o’ nights.

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.

When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

Think you I am no stronger than my sex, Being so father’d and so husbanded?

You are my true and honorable wife, As dear to me as are the ruddy drops That visit my sad heart.

Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber.

Dwell I but in the suburbs Of your good pleasure?

Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.

But when I tell him he hates flatterers, He says he does, being then most flattered.

O conspiracy! Sham’st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night, When evils are most free?

Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.

Therefore think him as a serpent’s egg Which, hatch’d, would, as his kind, grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell.

’Tis a common proof, That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder, Whereto the climber-upward turns his face; But when he once attains the upmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend.

The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins Remorse from power.

O! he sits high in all the people’s hearts: And that which would appear offense in us, His countenance, like richest alchemy, Will change to virtue and to worthiness.

So every bondman in his own hand bears The power to cancel his captivity.

Yesterday the bird of night did sit, Even at noonday, upon the marketplace, Hooting and shrieking.

Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort As if he mock’d himself, and scorn’d his spirit That could be mov’d to smile at anything.

But, for my own part, it was Greek to me. 26

He reads much; He is a great observer, and he looks Quite through the deeds of men.

Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, That he is grown so great?

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus; and we petty men Walk under his huge legs, and peep about To find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Stemming it with hearts of controversy.

Well, honor is the subject of my story. I cannot tell what you and other men Think of this life; but, for my single self, I had as lief not be as live to be In awe of such a thing as I myself.

Set honor in one eye and death i’ the other, And I will look on both indifferently.

Beware the ides of March.

Have you not made a universal shout, That Tiber trembled underneath her banks, To hear the replication of your sounds Made in her concave shores?

Done to death by slanderous tongues.

For there was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently.