What is your favourite Shakespeare quote?

Always a nice topic, (and thankfully my memory isn't failing me), but there was a big discussion on here about this a few years back related to a book launch:

www.gransnet.com/forums/competitions/a1205389-Hast-thou-a-favourite-quote-by-the-bard-Shakespeare

Lots of new members since then though ...

And mine hasn't changed:

Full fathom five thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.

What’s in a name? A rose by any name would smell as sweet.

(Romeo and Juliet)

I was about 13 , doing Shakespeare in English Literature at school and was taken to see Romeo and Juliet. It totally brought alive the story for me and I loved this quote from it.

I had forgotten that, but it was a competition, so perhaps this time we will hear from regular members as opposed to regular members plus those angling for a prize

The first thing we do let's kill all the lawyers.

Yes!! it always gets a huge laugh, doesn't it?!!!

What is a man if his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed?
Hamlet

A quote that was very appropriate when my son was a teenager.

To thine own self be true

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
As You Like It

I don't have a brain for remembering quotes, but found this and I really like the one about father and son (background picture of a lion)

www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/william_shakespeare.html

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.

I find this inspiring
1

Last summer, visiting the RSC gift shop in Stratford, I bought a bright pink pencil for DGD's teacher. Soon afterwards she commented that the quote was a very appropriate description of our feisty but loveable 5 yr-old. So my current favourite quote is
'She may be little but she is fierce!'

Annie, we always quoted that to our children and encouraged them to live their lives accordingly. It hasn't necessarily made our lives as parents easy.

I have two pieces of mottoware with that on.

I love the sonnet Let Me Not To The Marriage of True Minds.

For the life of me I can't remember the number but I'm sitting with mum so can't check!

The quality of mercy is not strained etc.....
We read the Merchant of Venice for my GCE exam and surprisingly I really enjoyed it didn't think it would be my thing,sadly haven't read anymore

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”

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,

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

(From As You Like It)There is a lot more in between too, but it is rather long to post but poignant.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be (Hamlet)

The course of true love never did run smooth (Midsummer Night's Dream)

kitty Let Me Not To The Marriage of True Minds that is lovely too and chosen by someone dear to me for a reading at their marriage.

DH bought me a t-shirt with "She may be little but she be fierce" on it and my DSs nodded when they saw it. I can't think why!

not really a quote as such but my Grandad used to say Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, gloomily, when blossom blew off the apple trees too early.

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be
For loan oft loses both itself and friend
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
And this, above all,
To thine own self be true
For it follows as the day the night
Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Sage advice for all in any age.

What a brilliant man he was!

I like the sonnets.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no! It is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
T'is the star to ev'ry wandering barque
Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken
Loves not times fool
Tho' rosy lips and cheeks beneath 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
If this be error, and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Yes, hildaj, that one is a particular favourite of mine too. "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds". So perfectly expressed!

We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded by a sleep.

Tho she be but little she is fierce (a quote my daughter used in a piece of art work for our little fighter born at 27 weeks gestation

There would seem to be an apt quotation for every human situation (that's not a quote btw )