Change and Transformation

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

Refrain tonight; And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature.

With one auspicious and one dropping eye, With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole.

Consideration like an angel came, And whipp’d the offending Adam out of him.

This is the English, not the Turkish court; Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds, But Harry Harry.

We see which way the stream of time doth run And are enforc’d from our most quiet sphere By the rough torrent of occasion.

How many things by season season’d are To their right praise and true perfection!

The weakest kind of fruit Drops earliest to the ground.

Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth In strange eruptions.

To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose, And plant this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke.

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.

This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.

It is too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden; Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say it lightens.

But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy, But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads, My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown.

I see thy glory like a shooting star Fall to the base earth from the firmament.

Relenting fool, and shallow changing woman!

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

Now ’tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted; Suffer them now and they’ll o’ergrow the garden.

Sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud; And after summer evermore succeeds Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold: So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet.

Men loven of propre kynde newefangelnesse.

For I have seyn, of a ful misty morwe Folowen ful often a myrie someris day.

The true wisdom is to always be seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.

Be not a slave of your own past.