Life

Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease.

Life is an incurable disease.

The childhood shows the man, As morning shows the day.

Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv’st Live well; how long or short permit to Heaven.

For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night, Devoid of sense and motion?

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recovered greenness?

And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing: O my only light, It cannot be That I am he On whom thy tempests fell all night.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

The self-same sun that shines upon his court Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike.

Everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment.

Live to be the show and gaze o’ the time.

She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Life’s uncertain voyage.

When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools.

Nature in you stands on the very verge Of her confine.

A good man’s fortune may grow out at heels.

Who in the lusty stealth of nature take More composition and fierce quality Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed, Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops.

A breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences.

Why, let the stricken deer go weep, The hart ungalled play; For some must watch, while some must sleep: So runs the world away.

He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

And then he drew a dial from his poke, And, looking on it with lack-luster eye, Says very wisely, “It is ten o’clock; Thus may we see,” quoth he, “how the world wags.” 27

Who doth ambition shun, And loves to live i’ the sun, Seeking the food he eats, And pleas’d with what he gets.

His life was gentle, and the elements So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, “This was a man!”

There is a history in all men’s lives.