Category: Lit & Crit

“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

“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

“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

“Morality, at heart, is the idea that one’s own perspective is not privileged—that the only coherent code of behavior takes a disinterested perspective that applies equally to oneself and to others.” – Steven Pinker, The Seed Salon

“There is something in grasping another person in the full complexity of their own personhood that entails another domain of facts, facts about rights and obligations. There are ways that you can and can’t morally treat a subject of experience, especially if that subject is a person.” – Rebecca Goldstein, The Seed Salon

“To subjugate yourself to the objective truth is a humbling experience.” – Rebecca Goldstein, The Seed Salon

“To expostulate what majesty should be, what duty is, why day is day, night night, and time is time, were nothing but to waste night, day, and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 2.2

“So oft it chances in particular men that, for some vicious mole of nature in them, as in their birth,—wherein they are not guilty, since nature cannot choose his origin,—by the o’ergrowth of some complexion, oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason; or by some habit, that too much o’er-leavens the form of plausible manners;—that these men,—carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, being nature’s livery or fortune’s star,—their virtues else,—be they as pure as grace, as infinite as man may undergo,—shall in the general censure take corruption from that particular fault.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.4

“When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“This above all,—to thine ownself be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be: for loan oft loses both itself and friend; and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Beware of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in, bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportion’d thought his act.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 5.1