Shakespeare, William (1564 – 1616), Greatest English dramatist & poet
Talkers are no good doers; be assur’d we come to use our hands and not our tongues.
Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.
Be great in act, as you have been in thought.
The worst is not so long as we can say, “This is the worst.”
Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.
I am sure care’s an enemy to life.
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come…. Julius Caesar
How use doth breed a habit in a man.
I have immortal longings in me.
And many strokes, though with a little axe, Hew down and fell the hardest-timbered oak.
Things without all remedy should be without regard: What’s done is done.
I am not merry; but I do beguile the thing I am, by seeming otherwise.
Strong reasons make strong actions.
If wishes would prevail with me, my purpose should not fail with me.
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.
Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, and look on death itself.
I have a man’s mind, but a woman’s might.
Women may fall when there’s no strength in men.
Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.
I dote on his very absence.
They breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
An old man is twice a child.
I hold ambition of so light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
I am not bound to please thee with my answers.
In a false quarrel there is no true valour.
Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.
Tis beauty that doth oft make women proud; but, God He knows, thy share thereof is small.
When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
The trust I have is in mine innocence,
and therefore am I bold and resolute.
Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none.
Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man….. Hamlet, Act 1 scene 3
Have more than thou showest; Speak less than thou knowest.
It is not enough to help the feeble up, but to support him after.
The soul of this man is in his clothes.
Thou art all the comfort,
The Gods will diet me with.
We do not keep the outward form of order, where there is deep disorder in the mind.
Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it.
I am constant as the northern star, of whose true fix’d and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament.
Poor and content is rich, and rich enough; but riches fineless is as poor as winter to him that ever fears he shall be poor.
But screw your courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail.
A woman impudent and mannish grown is not more loathed than an effeminate man in time of action.
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward.
There is left us ourselves to end ourselves.
A man can die but once.
Ah, what a sign it is of evil life, where death’s approach is seen so terrible!
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.
The sense of death is most in apprehension; and the poor beetle, that we tread upon, in corporal sufferance feels a pang as great as when a giant dies.
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
Distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough.
Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.
Drink provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.
O God, that man should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!
Nothing will come of nothing.
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily… is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat.
Men at some time are the masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
His flight was madness: when our actions do not, our fears do make us traitors.
To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength, gives in your weakness strength unto your foe.
We are advertis’d by our loving friends.
Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperses to naught.
Be not afraid of greatness: some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.
What’s gone and what’s past help
Should be past grief.
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.
How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.
Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; take honour from me and my life is done.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child!
Things are often spoke and seldom meant.
Ill deeds are doubled with an evil word.
Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ.
I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.
So may he rest, his faults lie gently on him!
What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart: but the saying is true ‘The empty vessel makes the greatest sound’.
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.
Doubt that the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
He is the half part of a blessed man,
Left to be finished by such as she;
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.
Some cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.
Ruin has taught me to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing.
Ask me no reason why I love you; for though Love use Reason for his physician, he admits him not for his counsellor.
Alas, their love may be call’d appetite. No motion of the liver, but the palate.
Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
O curse of marriage, that we can call these delicate creatures ours, and not their appetites.
Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.
Frame your mind to mirth and merriment, which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor; for ’tis the mind that makes the body rich.
Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.
The little foolery that wise men have makes a great show.
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.
How poor are they who have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees.
A merry heart goes all the day, your sad tires in a mile-a.
Small to greater matters must give way.
Men’s vows are women’s traitors!
Our bodies are our gardens to which our wills are gardeners.
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself.
He’s loved of the distracted multitude, who like not in their judgement, but their eyes.
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.
My tongue will tell the anger of mine heart, Or else my heart, concealing it, will break.
Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.
Men of few words are the best men.
Weighest thy words before thou givest them breath.
I am a man more sinn’d against than sinning.
Do not cast away an honest man for a villain’s accusation.
The fringed curtains of thine eye advance.
Sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye, steal me awhile from mine own company.
Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; the thief doth fear each bush an officer.
Bid Suspicion double-lock the door.
Make not your thoughts your prisons.
Call home thy ancient thoughts from banishment.
Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.
Virtue and genuine graces in themselves speak what no words can utter.
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
To do a great right, do a little wrong.
The peace of heaven is theirs that lift their swords, in such a just and charitable war.
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Wishers were ever fools.
Thy wish was father… to that thought.
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en;
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
How my achievements mock me!
Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like a toad, though ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in its head.
I pray thee cease thy counsel, Which falls into mine ears as profitless as water in a sieve.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety.
Ambition, the soldier’s virtue, rather makes choice of loss, than gain which darkens him.
The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Virtue is choked with foul ambition.
Lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.
For they are yet ear-kissing arguments.
The attempt and not the deed
Confounds us.
Show me a mistress that is passing fair, what doth her beauty serve but as a note where I may read who pass’d that passing fair?
Look on beauty, and you shall see ’tis purchased by the weight.
Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good;
A shining gloss that vadeth suddenly;
A flower that dies when first it ‘gins to bud;
A brittle glass that’s broken presently:
A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower,
Lost, vaded, broken, dead within the hour.
I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
My library was dukedom large enough.
Was ever book containing such vile matter so fairly bound? O, that deceit should dwell in such a gorgeous palace!
Brevity is the soul of wit.
He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.
I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind.
It is a wise father that knows his own child.
How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.
I feel within me a peace above all earthly dignities, a still and quiet conscience.
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.
O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, that thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down, and steep my senses in forgetfulness.
Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep!” – the innocent sleep.
Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honoured in the breach than the observance.
In the night, imagining some fear, how easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end.
Hereafter, in a better world than this,
I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.
I would fain die a dry death.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Against self-slaughter there is a prohibition so divine that cravens my weak hand.
Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers come to dust.
He that dies pays all debts.
This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.
The devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape.
The better part of valour is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted, nor to one place.
O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!
I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at.
Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art:
Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote
The unreasonable fury of a beast:
Unseemly woman in a seeming man! Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!
Fill all thy bones with aches.
How far your eyes may pierce, I cannot tell; striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.
They are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.
What a deformed thief this fashion is.
Best safety lies in fear.
Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
Foolery… does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere.
The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Pray you now, forget and forgive.
Fortune, that arrant whore, ne’er turns the key to the poor.
So every bondman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
My meaning in saying he is a good man, is to have you understand me that he is sufficient.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
It easeth some, though none it ever cured, to think their dolour others have endured.
Short time seems long in sorrow’s sharp sustaining.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow…
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
How bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!
In time we hate that which we often fear.
An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told.
The miserable have no other medicine, but only hope.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility.
A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.
Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news: give to a gracious message an host of tongues; but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt.
Gardener, for telling me these news of woe, pray God the plants thou graft’st may never grow.
Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind,
As man’s ingratitude.
Many that are not mad have, sure, more lack of reason.
There’s daggers in men’s smiles.
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
The whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings;
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
Although the last, not least.
We must not make a scarecrow of the law, setting it up to fear the birds of prey, and let it keep one shape, till custom make it their perch and not their terror.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground.
For aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself And trust no agent.
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
But miserable most, to love unloved? This you should pity rather than despise.
Things base and vile, holding no quantity, love can transpose to form and dignity.
O sovereign mistress of true melancholy.
Love reasons without reason.
Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear; where little fear grows great, great love grows there.
The expedition of my violent love outrun the pauser, reason.
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were decievers ever,
One foot in the sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
She cannot love, nor take no shape nor project of affection, she is so self-endeared.
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice: Then must you speak of one that loved not wisely but too well.
Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boist’rous, and it pricks like a thorn.
If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.
Swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
If love be blind, it best agrees with night.
When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.
My love is strengthen’d, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear:
That love is merchandised whose rich esteeming
The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere.
My reason, the physician to my love, angry that his prescriptions are not kept, hath left me.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red…
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes…
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.
Love’s best habit is a soothing tongue.
Love thrives not in the heart that shadows dreadeth.
Even as one heat another heat expels, or as one nail by strength drives out another, so the remembrance of my former love is by a newer object quite forgotten.
Now my love is thaw’d; which, like a waxen image ‘gainst a fire, bears no impression of the thing it was.
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.
This is the third time; I hope good luck lies in odd numbers…. There is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many things I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
Men have marble, women waxen, minds.
Though men can cover crimes with bold stern looks, poor women’s faces are their own faults’ books.
How ever do we praise ourselves, our fancies are more giddy and uniform, more longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, than women’s are.
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
There is a devilish mercy in the judge, if you’ll implore it, that will free your life, but fetter you till death.
Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.
Present mirth hath present laughter; what’s to come is still unsure.
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.
Though fortune’s malice overthrow my state, my mind exceeds the compass of her wheel.
If there were reason for these miseries, then into limits could I bind my woes.
Since Cleopatra died,
I have liv’d in such dishonour that the gods
Detest my baseness.
When griping grief the heart doth wound,
and doleful dumps the mind opresses,
then music, with her silver sound,
with speedy help doth lend redress.
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour!
Music, moody food of us that trade in love.
In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.
Their savage eyes turn’d to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods;
Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.
To know the cause why music was ordain’d! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN!
He must needs go that the devil drives.
You cram these words into mine ears against the stomach of my sense.
Ornament is but the guiled shore to a most dangerous sea.
Give me that man that is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him in my hearts core.
A very little thief of occasion will rob you of a great deal of patience.
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper sprinkle cool patience.
Though patience be a tired mare, yet she will plod.
Had it pleas’d heaven to try me with affliction… I should have found in some place of my soul a drop of patience.
What’s done cannot be undone.
What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.
The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation; that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.
While thou livest keep a good tongue in thy head.
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?
We are not ourselves when nature, being oppress’d, commands the mind to suffer with the body.
When valour preys on reason, it eats the sword it fights with.
Be check’d for silence, but never tax’d for speech.
I do know of these that… only are reputed wise for saying nothing.
Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go.
A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep and do the effects of watching!
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.
When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
A heavy heart bears not a nimble tongue.
Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp’d, doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.
If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.
Do as adversaries do in law, strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.
The fool multitude, that choose by show, not learning more than the fond eye doth teach.
See what a ready tongue suspicion hath!
My heart suspects more than mine eye can see.
He that is robb’d, not wanting what is stolen, Let him not know ‘t, and he’s not robb’d at all.
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool.
The time is out of joint : O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!
Time’s the king of men; he’s both their parent, and he is their grave, and gives them what he will, not what they crave.
Nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence.
Time’s glory is to calm contending kings, To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light, To stamp the seal of time in aged things, To wake the morn of sentinel the night, To wrong the wronger till he render right, To ruinate proud buildings with thy hour And smear with dust their glittering golden towers.
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour’d
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon as done.
That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man,
If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.
Trust not him that has once broken faith.
Truth is truth. To the end of reckoning.
While you live tell truth and shame the devil.
But ’tis strange and oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence.
How much more doth beauty beauteous seem by that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
Against my soul’s pure truth why labour you to make it wander in an unknown field?
Truth will come to light … at the length, the truth will out.
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
There is no vice so simple but assumes some mark of virtue on his outward parts.
Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
Thy words, I grant are bigger, for I wear not, my dagger in my mouth.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood….. King Henry V”, Act 3 scene 1
He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.
Frailty, thy name is woman!
Women being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the walls.
To be slow in words is a woman’s only virtue.
I understand a fury in your words,
But not the words.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
We know what we are, but not what we may be.
Tis neither here nor there.
I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.
Let Hercules himself do what he may, the cat will mew, and dog will have his day.
Every why hath a wherefore.