“Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, when our deep plots do fail: and that should teach us there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 5.2
“Let Hercules himself do what he may, the cat will mew, and dog will have his day.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 5.1
“Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away: o, that that earth which kept the world in awe should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 5.1
“There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers; they hold up Adam’s profession.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 5.1
“That we would do we should do when we would; for this would changes, and hath abatements and delays as many as there are tongues, are hands, are accidents; and then this should is like a spendthrift sigh that hurts by easing.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 4.7 (emphases in original)
“Youth no less becomes the light and careless livery that it wears than settled age his sables and his weeds, importing health and graveness.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 4.7
“What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unus’d. Now, whether it be bestial oblivion or some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event,—a thought which, quarter’d, hath one part wisdom and ever three parts coward,—I do not know why yet I live to say, This thing’s to do; sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means to do’t.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 4.4 (emphasis in original)
“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 4.3
“Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service,—two dishes, but to one table: that’s the end.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 4.3
“Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliance are reliev’d, or not at all.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 4.3
“May one be pardon’d and retain the offence? In the corrupted currents of this world offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice; and oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself buys out the law.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.3
“Whereto serves mercy but to confront the visage of offense? And what’s in prayer but this twofold force,—to be forestalled ere we come to fall, or pardon’d being down?” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.3
“The cease of majesty dies not alone but like a gulf doth draw what’s near it with it: it is a massy wheel, fix’d on the summit of the highest mount, to whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things are mortis’d and adjoin’d; which, when it falls, each small annexment, petty consequence, attends the boisterous ruin.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.3
“The single and peculiar life is bound, with all the strength and armour of the mind, to keep itself from ’noyance.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.3
“The poor advanc’d makes friends of enemies. And hitherto doth love on fortune tend: for who not needs shall never lack a friend.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.2
“Autocrats seek to create an apathetic, demobilized citizenry that they can easily control.” – Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz, “The Treacherous Path to a Better Russia,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2023
“What we do determine oft we break. Purpose is but the slave to memory; of violent birth, but poor validity.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.2
“Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear; where little fears grow great, great love grows there.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.2
“Bless’d are those whose blood and judgment are so well commingled that they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger to sound what stop she please.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.2
“The power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.1
“To the noble mind rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.1
“To be, or not to be—that is the question:—whether ’tis 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,— ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d. To die,—to sleep;—to sleep! perchance to dream:—ay, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause: there’s 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 despis’d 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 that the dread of something after death,—the undiscover’d 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 does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great pith and moment, with this regard, their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.1
“There’s no political posture that overrides the need to eat.” – Alicia Kennedy, “On Tradwives”
“What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in appearance, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 2.2
“The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 2.2
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 2.2
“To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 2.2
“Fiction is simulated gossip. You’re a witness to the secret foibles of other people. They just happen not to exist.” – Steven Pinker, The Seed Salon
“Storytelling, in general, has a moral use. To be in the throes of a story, to have one’s emotions provoked by another’s story, is not quite ethics, but it’s kind of the shadowlife of ethics. We train children by telling them stories. We try to get them to feel their way into other lives, and that itself is something. If we had no capacity for that there would be no hope. It would just be all rules that you would follow for fear of being punished if you didn’t. And that doesn’t amount to becoming a moral agent.” – Rebecca Goldstein, The Seed Salon
“One problem for anyone like me who believes in a fixed human nature, including a fixed moral sense, is to explain how human behavior could have changed so radically over a few centuries or millennia. Much of the world has seen an end to slavery, to genocide for convenience, to torture as a routine form of criminal punishment, to capital punishment for property crimes, to human sacrifice, to rape as the spoils of war, to the ownership of women. We seem to be turning into a nicer species.” – Steven Pinker, The Seed Salon