Citatsektionen | Humanistiske citater

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Udvalgt af Rune Engelbreth Larsen

    WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Berowne/Biron):
    But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,
    Lives not alone immured in the brain;
    But, with the motion of all elements,
    Courses as swift as thought in every power,
    And gives to every power a double power,
    Above their functions and their offices.
    It adds a precious seeing to the eye;
    A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
    A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,
    When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd:
    Love's feeling is more soft and sensible
    Than are the tender horns of cockl'd snails;
    Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste:
    For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
    Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
    Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical
    As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair:
    And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
    Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.
    Never durst poet touch a pen to write
    Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs;
    O! then his lines would ravish savage ears,
    And plant in tyrants mild humility.
    From women's 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;
    Else none at all in aught proves excellent.

LOVE'S LABOUR LOST, ca. 1594

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Richard II):
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

KING RICHARD II, ca. 1595

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Shylock):
He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in all the rest, we shall resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

    WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Bassanio):
    So may the outward shows be least themselves;
    The world is still deceiv'd with ornament.
    In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt
    But, being season'd with a gracious voice,
    Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
    What damned error but some sober brow
    Will bless it, and approve it with a text,
    Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
    There is no vice so simple but assumes
    Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.
    How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false
    As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
    The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars;
    Who, inward search'd, have livers white as milk!
    And these assume but valour's excrement
    To render them redoubted. Look on beauty
    And you shall see 'tis purchas'd by the weight,
    Which therein works a miracle in nature,
    Making them lightest that wear most of it;
    So are those crisped snaky golden locks
    Which make such wanton gambols with the wind
    Upon supposed fairness often known
    To be the dowry of a second head-
    The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.
    Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
    To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
    Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,
    The seeming truth which cunning times put on
    To entrap the wisest. (...)

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, ca. 1596

    WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Caesar):
    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.
    On such a full sea are we now afloat,
    And we must take the current when it serves,
    Or lose our ventures.

JULIUS CAESAR, 1599

    WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Polonius):
    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 (Polonius):
Ay sir, to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man pick'd out of two thousand.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Hamlet):
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

HAMLET, ca. 1601

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Clown):
I say there is no darkness but ignorance.

TWELFTH NIGHT, ca. 1601