Courage and Strength

Celerity is never more admir’d Than by the negligent.

I bear a charmed life.

Blow, wind! come, wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back.

Hang out our banners on the outward walls; The cry is still, “They come”; our castle’s strength Will laugh a siege to scorn.

Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn The power of man, for none of woman born Shall harm Macbeth.

What man dare, I dare: Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear, The arm’d rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger; Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble.

So weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune, That I would set my life on any chance, To mend it or be rid on ’t.

Who can be wise, amaz’d, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man.

Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures; ’tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil.

Macbeth: If we should fail— Lady Macbeth: We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, And we’ll not fail.

I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.

Nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it; he died As one that had been studied in his death To throw away the dearest thing he ow’d, As ’twere a careless trifle.

I am tied to the stake, and I must stand the course.

I will be the pattern of all patience.

Let not women’s weapons, waterdrops, Stain my man’s cheeks!

Is this the noble nature Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue The shot of accident nor dart of chance Could neither graze nor pierce?

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

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.

Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honor’s at the stake.

How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unus’d.

They are not a pipe for fortune’s finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee. Something too much of this.

A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards Hast ta’en with equal thanks.

But I am pigeon-liver’d, and lack gall To make oppression bitter.