Quotes by William Shakespeare

Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; its spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than wars a destroyer of men.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended,That you have but slumbered hereWhile these visions did appear.And this weak and idle theme,No more yielding but a dream,Gentles, do not reprehend:If you pardon, we will mend:And, as I am an honest Puck,If we have unearned luckNow to scape the serpents tongue,We will make amends ere long;Else the Puck a liar call;So, good night unto you all.Give me your hands, if we be friends,And Robin shall restore amends.

True, I talk of dreams,Which are the children of an idle brain,Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,Which is as thin of substance as the air,And more inconstant than the wind, who woos Even now the frozen bosom of the north,And, being angerd, puffs away from thence,Turning his side to the dew-dropping south.

...and then, in dreaming, / The clouds methought would open and show riches / Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked / I cried to dream again.

For some must watch, while some must sleep So runs the world away

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, mans hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottoms Dream, because it hath no bottom...

Thought is free.

O hell! to choose love by anothers eye.

More of your conversation would infect my brain.

Don Pedro - (...)In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke.Benedick - The savage bull may, but if ever the sensible Benedick bear it, pluck off the bulls horns and set them in my forehead, and let me be vildly painted; and in such great letters as they writes, Here is good horse for hire, let them signify under my sign, Here you may see Benedick the married man.

- Where is Polonius?- In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger find him not there, seek him i the other place yourself.

Theres meaning in thy snores.

Dispute not with her: she is lunatic.

If I be waspish, best beware my sting.

Make the doors upon a womans wit,and it will out at the casement;shut that, and twill out at the key-hole;stop that, twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.

From womens eyes this doctrine I derive:They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;They are the books, the arts, the academes,That show, contain and nourish all the world.

DON PEDROCome, lady, come; you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick.BEATRICEIndeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one: marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it.DON PEDROYou have put him down, lady, you have put him down.BEATRICESo I would not he should do me, my lord, lest I should prove the mother of fools.

Were kisses all the joys in bed,/One woman would another wed.