FROM SHAKESPEARE’S WRITINGS
1.
Unquiet
meals make ill digestion,---Comedy of Errors, Act 5.
2.
And
as imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen/Turns
them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a
name,---Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act 5.
3.
Blow,
blow, thou winter wind,/Thou are not so unkind/As man’s ingratitude. Thy tooth
is not so keen,/Because thou art not seen,/Although thy breath be rude.---As
You Like It, Act 2.
4.
How
sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is/To have a thankless child!----King Lear,
Act .
5.
The
web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: Our virtues would
be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they
were not cherished by our virtues.---All’s Welll That Ends Well, Act 4.
6.
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.---Macbeth, Act 5.
7.
We
are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with
sleep.----Tempest, Act 4.
8.
Love
is merely a madness, and I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip
as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that
the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.---As You Like It,
Act 3.
9.
Love
is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/Or bends with the remover to
remove:/O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,/That looks on tempests and is never
shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark,/Whose worth’s unknown. Although
his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks/Within
his bending sickle’s compass come;/Love alters not with his brief hours and
weeks,/But bears it out even to the edge of doom./---Sonnet CXV1.
10.
Love sought is good, but given unsought is
better.---Twelfth Night, Act 2.
11.
Love is blind.---Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act
2.
12.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,/Such
shaping fantasies, that apprehend/More than cool reason ever
comprehends.---Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act 5.
13.
The
lunatic, the lover, and the poet,/Are of imagination compact;/One sees more
devils than vast hell can hold,/That is the madman; the lover, all as frantic,’Sees
Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.----Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5.
14.
Horses are tied by the head, dogs and bears by
the neck, monkeys by the loins, and men by the legs: when a man is over-lusty at
legs, then he wears wooden nether-stocks.---King Lear, Act 2.
15.
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In
action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! The paragon of animals! ----Hamlet, Act 2.
16.
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,/It droppeth
as the gentle rain from heaven,/Upon the place beneath. It is twice bless’d;/It
blesseth him that gives and him that takes:/’T is mightiest in the mightiest ;
it becomes/The throned monarch better than his crown;/His sceptre shows the
force of temporal power,/The attribute to awe and majesty,/Wherein doth sit the
dread and fear of kings;/But mercy is above the sceptred sway,/It is enthroned
in the hearts of kings,/It is an attribute to God himself,/An earthly power
doth then show likest God’s/When mercy seasons justice.---Merchant of Venice,
Act 4.
******
G.R.Kanwal
24 March 2026
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