King Lear

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

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

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on 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 whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

Many a true word hath been spoken in jest.

The prince of darkness is a gentleman!

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most: we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

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

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

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take upon's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon.

I am a man more sinned against than sinning

In jest, there is truth.

This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.

O, let me kiss that hand! KING LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our teeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurour 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!

Mark it, nuncle. 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 shalt have more Than two tens to a score.

Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind.

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.

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 knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable 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, pandar, 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.

Love's not love When it is mingled with regards that stand Aloof from th' entire point.

The art of our necessities is strange That can make vile things precious.

You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face

When we our betters see bearing our woes, We scarcely think our miseries our foes.

When the mind's free, The Body's delicate.

I will have such revenges on you both, That all the world shall—I will do such things— What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the earth!

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!