King Lear

"Nothing can come of nothing: speak again."

"Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty According to my bond; no more nor less."

"Mend your speech a little, Lest you may mar your fortunes."

"Lear: So young, and so untender? Cordelia: So young, my lord, and true. Lear: Let it be so; — thy truth, then, be thy dower."

"Come not between the dragon and his wrath."

"Lear: The bow is bent and drawn; make from the shaft. Kent: Let it fall rather, though the fork invade The region of my heart"

"Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow Upon the foul disease."

"Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides: Who cover faults, at last shame them derides."

"Tis the infirmity of his age: yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself."

"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 Got 'tween asleep and wake?"

"Now, gods, stand up for bastards!"

"We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves."

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"

"Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink."

"Have more than thou showest, Speak less than thou knowest, Lend less than thou owest, Ride more than thou goest, Learn more than thou trowest, Set less than thou throwest; Leave thy drink and thy whore, And keep in-a-door, And thou shall have more Than two tens to a score."

"The hedge sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, That it had it head bit off by it young."

"Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, More hideous, when thou show'st thee in a child Than the sea-monster!"

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child!"

"Striving to better, oft we mar what's well."

"Oswald: Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not. Kent: Fellow, I know thee. Oswald: What dost thou know me for? Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition."

"I have seen better faces in my time, Than stands on any shoulder that I see Before me at this instant."

"This is some fellow, Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect A saucy roughness, and constrains the garb Quite from his nature: He cannot flatter, he! An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth: An they will take it, so; if not, he's plain. These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness Harbor more craft and more corrupter ends Than twenty silly-ducking observants That stretch their duties nicely."

"Fortune, good-night: smile once more; turn thy wheel!"

"That sir which serves and seeks for gain, And follows but for form, Will pack when it begins to rain, And leave thee in the storm. But I will tarry; the fool will stay, And let the wise man fly: The knave turns fool that runs away; The fool, no knave, perdy."

"O, sir, you are old; Nature in you stands on the very verge Of her confine: you should be rul'd and led By some discretion, that discerns your state Better than you yourself."

"Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous: Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life is cheap as beast's."

"You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both! If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts Against their father, fool me not so much To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger, And let not women's weapons, water-drops, Stain my man's cheeks!"

"I will do such things, What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be The terrors of the earth."

"I have full cause of weeping; but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!"

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's molds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man!"

"I am a man, More sinn'd against than sinning."

"The art of our necessities is strange, And can make vile things precious."

"He that has and a little tiny wit, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, Must make content with his fortunes fit, Though the rain it raineth every day."

"O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; No more of that."

"Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O! I have ta'en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just."

"Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here's three on 's are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself; unaccomodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art."

"The prince of darkness is a gentleman."

"Child Rowland to the dark tower came, His word was still, —Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man."

"He's mad, that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath."

"Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool."

"Go, thrust him out at gates, and let him smell His way to Dover."

"I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw: full oft 'tis seen, Our means secure us, and our mere defects Prove our commodities."

"And worse I may be yet: the worst is not, So long as we can say, This is the worst."

"As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, — They kill us for their sport."

"You are not worth the dust which the rude wind Blows in your face."

"She that herself will sliver and disbranch From her material sap, perforce must wither And come to deadly use."

"Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile: Filths savour but themselves."

"It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions;"

"How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low! The crows and choughs, that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles; halfway down Hangs one that gathers samphire, — dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head. The fishermen, that walk upon the beach, Appear like mice, and yond tall anchoring bark Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge, That on the unnumber'ed idle pebbles chafes, Cannot be heard so high."

"Ay, every inch a king: When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man's life. — What was thy cause? — Adultery? — Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No: The wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive; for Gloster's bastard son Was kinder to his father than my daughters Got 'tween the lawful sheets. To't, luxury, pell-mell! for I lack soldiers. — Behold yond simpering dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow; That minces virtue, and does shake the head To hear of pleasure's name; — The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With a more riotous appetite Down from the waist they are centaurs, Though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiend's; there's hell, there's darkness, There is the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption! — fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination: there's money for thee."