Shakespeare

'Cowards die many

times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.'

'O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is

the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.'

'At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish

a snow in May's new-fangled mirth;
But like of each thing that in season grows.'

'Exit, pursued by a

bear.'

'The courses of

true love never did run smooth.'

'My heart is ever at your service.'

'Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

You cannot be old sire for you are not yet wise. King Lear

Anthony: I must with haste from hence.

Enobarbus: Why, then we kill all our women. We see how mortal an unkindness is to them; if they suffer our departure, death's the word.

Anthony: I must be gone.

Enobarbus: Under a compelling occasion, let women die: it were pity to cast them away for nothing, though between them and a great cause, they should be esteemed nothing. Cleopatra catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly. I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment; I do think there is mettle in death, which commits some loving act upon her, she hath such a celerity in dying.

Anthony: She is cunning past man's thought.

Enobarbus: Alack, sir, no, her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love. We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report.

Of course, it is the quality of the writing here which catches my attention, and there is, I swear, not even the slightest shadow of agreement to be found in me on these claims to women's cunning.

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


The Tempest

Double, double toil and trouble, fire, burn; and cauldron bubble.

MacBeth

The quality.....Sure blatham. Sure.

Me thinks thou dost jest, sire.

Sir, there is not the merest thought in me of womens' cunning. In proof, I shall swear it so, and in so swearing, evidence that I be stolid as befits a man in swearing and not rather nimble afoot as like to a young damsel who swears one way in May and another in June. More, I do swear it upon the grave of the very woman who bore me and raised me up, and surely it would be artifice past cunning for any son to weave a tale of she who waved her tail in his begetting.

My love is a fever, longing still
For that which nurseth the disease, Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, Th' uncertain sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me, and I desperate now approve Desire is death, which physic did except. Past cure I am, now reason is past care, And frantic mad with evermore unrest; My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are, At random from the truth vainly expressed; For I have sworn thee fair, and thought the bright, Who art is black as hell, as dark as night.

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-pil'd hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical.

Moth: They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

Costard: O! they have lived long on the almsbasket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.

In the posteriors of this day, which the rude multitude call the afternoon.

Flap-dragon is a word we ought to bump into more often. This is a meager age we live in.

What other pleasure can the world afford? I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap, and deck my body in gay ornaments, and witch sweet ladies with my words and looks.

'There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.'

~ Julius Caesar

'Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast.'

'Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.'

'O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.'