SHAKESPEARE SAID (PART 2)
1.
The
web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
2.
Life
is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
3.
Who
ever loved that loved not at first sight?
4.
When
love speaks, the voice of all the gods make heaven drowsy with the harmony.
5.
Love
is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
6.
Love
is 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.
7.
Love’s
fire heats water, water cools not love.
8.
Love
sought is good, but given unsought is better.
9.
Love
is not blind; it has twenty pairs of eyes.
10.Love can comment
upon every woe.
11.Lovers are given to poetry, and what they swear in poetry
may be
said as lovers they do feign.
12.Every subject’s duty is the king’s, but every subject’s
soul is his own.
13. 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
nether-stocks.
14. Fie on sinful
fantasy! Fie on lust and luxury! Lust is but a bloody fire, kindled with unchaste desire.
15. Madness in great
ones must not unwatched go.
16. Men are April
when they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids, but
the sky changes when they are wives.
17. Memory is the warder of the brain!
18. 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!
19. The quality
of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, upon the
place beneath: it is twice blessed; it blesseth him that gives and him that
takes. It 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
this 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.
20. To be, or not to be. That is the question: whether it is
nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to
take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die ---to
sleep, no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand
natural shocks that flesh is heir to. It is a consummation devoutly to be
wished. To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream –ay, there is the rub:
for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have of this mortal
coil. Must give us pause –there is the respect that makes calamity of so long
life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong,
the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay, the
insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes,
when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? Who would fardels
bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but the dread of something after
death, the undiscovered country , from whose bourn no traveller returns,
puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to
others that we know not of? Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, and thus
the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with pale cast of thought, and
enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry
and lose the name of action.
(Concluded)
*********
G.R.Kanwal
26 May 2026
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