Destiny and Overcoming

In my school-days, when I had lost one shaft, I shot his fellow of the selfsame flight The selfsame way with more advised watch, To find the other forth, and by adventuring both, I oft found both.

I know you all, and will a while uphold The unyok’d humor of your idleness: Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at, By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work.

O! I am Fortune’s fool.

A pair of star-cross’d lovers.

All places that the eye of heaven visits Are to a wise man ports and happy havens. Teach thy necessity to reason thus; There is no virtue like necessity. Think not the king did banish thee, But thou the king.

When Fortune means to men most good, She looks upon them with a threatening eye.

Why, headstrong liberty is lash’d with woe. There’s nothing situate under heaven’s eye But hath his bound, in earth, in sea, in sky.

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

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.

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

For many men that stumble at the threshold Are well foretold that danger lurks within.

What fates impose, that men must needs abide; It boots not to resist both wind and tide.

To fortune’s yoke, but let thy dauntless mind Still ride in triumph over all mischance.

Delays have dangerous ends.

Nature that framed us of four elements, Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds: Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous Architecture of the world: And measure every wandering planet’s course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless Spheres, Will us to wear ourselves and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, That perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

For in the sterres, clerer than is glas, Is writen, God woot, whoso koude it rede, The deeth of every man.

I have found power in the mysteries of thought, exaltation in the chanting of the Muses; I have been versed in the reasonings of men; but Fate is stronger than anything I have known.

You were a stranger to sorrow: therefore Fate has cursed you.

The tyrant is a child of Pride Who drinks from his great sickening cup Recklessness and vanity, Until from his high crest headlong He plummets to the dust of hope. 7

All that is and shall be, And all the past, is his [Zeus’s].

But all your [Creon’s] strength is weakness itself against The immortal unrecorded laws of God. They are not merely now: they were and shall be Forever, beyond man utterly.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Though men pride themselves on their great actions, often they are not the result of any great design, but of chance.

Nothing is more active than thought, for it travels over the universe, and nothing is stronger than necessity for all must submit to it.