Sourced and curated.

Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd.

William Congreve

1697

★ 8.8

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 heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. 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.

Hamlet · 1616

★ 8.7

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea and one on shore, To one thing constant never.

Much Ado About Nothing · 1600

★ 7.8

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals-And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Hamlet · 1616

★ 7.3

Eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath.

A Midsummer Night's Dream · 1599

★ 7.2

Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

Macbeth · 1616

★ 7.2

Hell is other people.

Jean-Paul Sartre

1944

★ 7.1

See what a ready tongue suspicion hath!

Henry IV, Part 2 · 1597

★ 7.1

Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.

Timon of Athens · 1616

★ 7.1

One lives but once in this world.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Clavigo · 1774

★ 7.1

You have deeply ventured; But all must do so who would greatly win.

Lord Byron

1821

★ 7.1

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

Julius Caesar · 1599

★ 7.0

He’s loved of the distracted multitude, Who like not in their judgment, but their eyes.

Hamlet · 1616

★ 7.0

I am not in the roll of common men.

Henry IV, Part 1 · 1597

★ 7.0

No guest is so welcome in a friend's house that he will not become a nuisance after three days.

Pleusicles

200 BC

★ 7.0

There lives not three good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat and grows old.

Henry IV, Part 1 · 1597

★ 7.0

Frailty, thy name is woman!

Hamlet · 1616

★ 6.9

Good counselors lack no clients.

To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.

Measure for Measure · 1616

★ 6.9

Play · Tragicomedy

Pierre Corneille

Le Cid · 1636

★ 6.9

What pity is it, That we can die but once, to serve our country!

Joseph Addison

1713

★ 6.9

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Heinrich Heine

1821

★ 6.9

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people: Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls."

1934

★ 6.9

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

1934

★ 6.9

Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

1939

★ 6.9

You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"

1921

★ 6.9

What was once thought can never be unthought.

Friedrich Durrenmatt

The Physicists · 1962

★ 6.9

Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

Hamlet · 1616

★ 6.5

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 · 1599

★ 6.4

The whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

Twelfth Night · 1602

★ 6.4

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.

Macbeth · 1616

★ 6.4

Life teaches us to be less harsh with ourselves and with others.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Iphigenia in Tauris · 1787

★ 6.3

How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

Othello · 1604

★ 6.2

Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain.

Friedrich Schiller

The Maid of Orleans · 1801

★ 6.2

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

Anton Chekhov

Uncle Vanya · 1898

★ 6.2

Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, Shall win my love.

The Taming of the Shrew · 1594

★ 6.1

We know what we are but know not what we may be.

Hamlet · 1616

★ 6.1

People are not always what they seem.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Nathan the Wise · 1783

★ 6.1

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

1909

★ 6.1

A service beyond all recompense Weighs so heavy that it almost gives offense.

Pierre Corneille

Surena · 1674

★ 6.0

Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.

Much Ado About Nothing · 1600

★ 5.7

My salad days, When I was green in judgment.

Antony and Cleopatra · 1607

★ 5.7

Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Julius Caesar · 1599

★ 5.6

My age is as a lusty winter, Frosty but kindly.

As You Like It · 1616

★ 5.6

Who strives always to the utmost, For him there is salvation.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Faust · 1808

★ 5.6

A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it.

Love's Labour's Lost · 1597

★ 5.5

How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

The Merchant of Venice · 1598

★ 5.5

His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.

The Merchant of Venice · 1598

★ 5.5

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

Julius Caesar · 1599

★ 5.5

But be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em.

Twelfth Night · 1602

★ 5.5

If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die.

Twelfth Night · 1602

★ 5.5

He hath eaten me out of house and home.

Henry IV, Part 2 · 1597

★ 5.5

How apt the poor are to be proud!

Twelfth Night, Or What You Will · 1602

★ 5.5

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.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre · 1608

★ 5.5

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head. And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

As You Like It · 1616

★ 5.5

Play · Comedic play

Oscar Wilde

Lady Windermere's Fan · 1892

★ 5.5

The apparel oft proclaims the man.

Hamlet · 1616

★ 5.4

Press not a falling man too far!

Henry VIII · 1613

★ 5.4

Pains of love be sweeter far Than all other pleasures are.

John Dryden

Tyrannick Love, or The Royal Martyr · 1669

★ 5.4

What's not forbidden to do make bold.

Friedrich Schiller

The Camp of Wallenstein · 1798

★ 5.4

Play · Drama (play) · Drama

Who reflects too much will accomplish little.

Friedrich Schiller

1804

★ 5.4

One can live for years sometimes, without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into a single hour.

Oscar Wilde

1880

★ 5.4

But miserable most, to love unloved? This you should pity rather than despise.

A Midsummer Night's Dream · 1599

★ 5.3

Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.

Julius Caesar · 1599

★ 5.3

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Death in itself is nothing, but we fear To be we know not what, we know not where.

Hamlet · 1616

★ 5.3

Play · Drama (play)

John Dryden

Aurenge-Zebe · 1675

★ 5.3

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science.

Charles Macklin

Love a la Mode · 1759

★ 5.3

Play · Satire

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

Plays Unpleasant · 1898

★ 5.3

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

J.M. Barrie

Peter Pan · 1904

★ 5.3

War is capitalism with the gloves off.

Tom Stoppard

1974

★ 5.3

Play · Drama (play) · Drama

America is God's crucible, the great melting pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!

Israel Zangwill

1908

★ 5.2

What is hell? Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

1949

★ 5.2

To remember everything is a condition of madness.

Brian Friel

1980

★ 5.2

I've always wanted to be somebody. But I see now I should have been more specific.

Jane Wagner

The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe · 1985

★ 5.2

The flow'ry way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

All's Well that Ends Well · 1616

★ 5.1

Play · Drama (play)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

1903

★ 5.1

Play · Drama (play)

Man and Superman · 1903

★ 5.1

Play · Problem play

Words pay no debts.