Quotes to inspire and reflect

Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devis’d at first to keep the strong in awe.

Give me another horse! bind up my wounds!

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!

True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings; Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.

The king’s name is a tower of strength.

Relenting fool, and shallow changing woman!

Is the chair empty? is the sword unsway’d? Is the king dead? the empire unpossess’d?

Harp not on that string.

An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.

A grievous burden was thy birth to me; Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy.

The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham’s bosom.

I am not in the giving vein today.

Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast; Ready with every nod to tumble down Into the fatal bowels of the deep.

Off with his head!

So wise so young, they say, do never live long. 4

A parlous boy.

Sorrow breaks seasons and reposing hours, Makes the night morning, and the noontide night.

The kingdom of perpetual night.

Lord, Lord! methought what pain it was to drown: What dreadful noise of water in mine ears! What sights of ugly death within mine eyes! Methought I saw a thousand fearful wracks; A thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon.

Talkers are no good doers.

O, I have pass’d a miserable night, So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams, That, as I am a Christian faithful man, I would not spend another such a night, Though ’twere to buy a world of happy days.

The day will come that thou shalt wish for me To help thee curse this pois’nous bunch-back’d toad.

And thus I clothe my naked villany With odd old ends stol’n forth of holy writ, And seem a saint when most I play the devil.

That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.

Was ever woman in this humor woo’d? Was ever woman in this humor won?

Look, how my ring encompasseth thy finger, Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart; Wear both of them, for both of them are thine.

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

This weak piping time of peace.

He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

Grim-visag’d war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front.

Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York.

For he being dead, with him is beauty slain, And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again.

The grass stoops not, she treads on it so light.

The owl, night’s herald.

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.

O! what a war of looks was then between them.

Like a red morn, that ever yet betoken’d Wrack to the seaman, tempest to the field.

“Fondling,” she saith, “since I have hemm’d thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; Feed where thou wilt, on mountain, or in dale: Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.”

Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.

This word “love,” which greybeards call divine.

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.

He’s sudden if a thing comes in his head.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; The thief doth fear each bush an officer.

So part we sadly in this troublous world, To meet with joy in sweet Jerusalem.

Men ne’er spend their fury on a child.

What though the mast be now blown overboard, The cable broke, the holding anchor lost, And half our sailors swallow’d in the flood? Yet lives our pilot still.

And, live we how we can, yet die we must.

A little fire is quickly trodden out, Which, being suffer’d, rivers cannot quench.