Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:51 am

“The records of the central government (and it should be remembered that the Byzantine Empire was a bureaucratic state par excellence), of the provincial administration, of the Church, of secular landlords, tenants, merchants and shopkeepers have all disappeared. As a result, we have no reliable population figures, no registers of births, marriages and deaths, no trade figures, no taxation figures—practically nothing, in short, that can be counted and used for statistical purposes.” – Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:41 am

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all 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: the poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 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. Such tricks hath strong imagination, that, if it would but apprehend some joy, it comprehends some bringer of that joy; or in the night, imagining some fear, how easy is a bush supposed a bear?” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 7:15 am

“Reason and love keep little company together now-a-days: the more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends.” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:39 am

“Things base and vile, holding no quantity, love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind. Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste; wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: and therefore is love said to be a child, because in choice he is so oft beguiled. As waggish boys in games themselves forswear, so the boy Love is perjur’d everywhere.” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:44 am

“Brief as the lightning in the collied night that, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, and ere a man hath power to say, Behold! the jaws of darkness devour it up: o quick bright things come to confusion.” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:50 am

“How oft when men are at the point of death have they been merry! which their keepers call a lightning before death.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 5.3

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:52 am

“She’s not well married that lives married long; but she’s best married that dies married young.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 4.5

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:52 am

“Lovers can see to do their amorous rites by their own beauties: or if love be blind, it best agrees with night.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 3.2

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:48 am

“Violent delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die; like fire and powder, which, as they kiss, consume: the sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness, and in the taste confounds the appetite: therefore love moderately; long love doth so; too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 2.6

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:50 am

“Love’s heralds should be thoughts, which ten times faster glide than the sun’s beams, driving back shadows over lowering hills.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 2.5

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 7:08 am

“Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye, and where care lodges sleep will never lie; but where unbruised youth with unstuff’d brain doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 2.3

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:54 am

“The earth, that’s nature’s mother, is her tomb; what is her burying grave, that is her womb: and from her womb children of divers kind we sucking on her natural bosom find; many for many virtues excellent, none but for some, and yet all different. O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies in herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities: for naught so vile that on the earth doth live but to the earth some special good doth give; nor aught so good but, strain’d from that fair use, revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse: virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied; and vice sometimes by action dignified.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 2.3

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:41 am

“Love goes toward love as school-boys from their books; but love from love, toward school with heavy looks.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 2.2

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:53 am

“When good manners shall lie all in one or two men’s hands, and they unwashed too, ’tis a foul thing.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 1.5

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 7:29 am

“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 wooes even now the frozen bosom of the north, and, being anger’d, puffs away from thence, turning his face to the dew-dropping south.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 1.4