Hast thou a favourite quote by the bard Shakespeare?

"Give every man thy ear but few thy voice.
Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment."
A good one for Gransnet perhaps

And

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry."

kitty I love the one you chose too, which comes from the same speech.

"He has killed me, mother." From the Scottish play, only because I will never forget the entire fourth form English class being reduced to helpless laughter, and our normally very strict English teacher being powerless to do anything about it and eventually laughing herself.

ooooh, so many to choose from.

From memory, so I may be slightly paraphrasing

"oh cuz, cuz cuz, my pretty little cuz, if only thou didst know how many fathom deep am I in love"

As you like it.

Or

"I do love nothing in the world so well as you"

Much Ado

Or

"A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing"

Macbeth

Or

The whole "make me a willow cabin at your gate" speech from Twelfth Night even though I dislike the play

Or

(I could really go on and on)

" A Lass Unparrallelled"

The whole quote is something along the lines of "death you have in your possession a lass unparrallelled", it's from Anthony and Cleopatra and it's at the base of a silver birch tree near the Royal Shakespeare Theatre on the banks of the Avon and it's to commemorate the most beautiful Vivien Leigh. I like to go and see it everytime I go to Stratford.

I'll stop now

"A plague on both their houses." from Romeo and Juliet.

The "Exit! pursued by a Bear" I posted earlier was a stage direction from

"The Winters Tale"

Cleopatra: Oh happy horse, to bear the weight of Anthony.
(think about it)

Had I but served my god with half the zeal I served the king
He would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.
(Henry VIII)

If all the year were playing holidays
To sport would be as tedious as to work
(Henry IV part 1)

Man's evil manners live in brass
Their virtues we write in water.
(Henry VIII)

alternatively

The evil that men do lives after them
The good is oft interred with their bones.
(Julius Caesar)

Sorry - once I start I can't stop....

That should read: 'men's evil manners live in brass....'

Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. - Lady Macbeth

My all time favourite Shakespeare is Sonnet 116 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds etc' which I learnt when I was around eleven having come across it in a book of love poems.

Hardly a quote though!

If one good deed in all my life I did
I do repent it from my very soul.

Henry VI (Part 2), Act 4, ‘First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’

It has a certain attractiveness...

Favourite sonnet:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun......

'I do desire that we be better strangers '
As You Like It

My dad used to quote King Lear at us if he thought we were not dutiful daughters:

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child.

Mine would have to be:

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

from Othello.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool

Love grumppa's one.

(the one starting, if one good deed)

Definitely Bottom from Midsummer Nights Dream.

I must to the barbers monsieur,
for methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face
and I am such a tender ass
if my hair does tickle me
I must scratch

Stiil makes me remembering doing it at school with a smelly hairpiece stuck to my face !

"Daffodils that come before the swallow dares,
And fill the winds of March with beauty" (Winter's Tale')

"Welcome, as the Spring is to the earth.." (Winter's Tale)

"He plowed her, and she furrowed." (A&C)!!!!

"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.....". (Hamlet)

Best stage direction; "Exit, pursued by a bear." (Winter's Tale)

'Have we no wine here?'

Coriolanus
(Act One, Scene Nine)

Riverwalk

I've always liked the curse from Macbeth Act 5 scene3:

"the devil damn thee black thou cream-faced loon" (you can put such feeling into it!)

if I am cut do I not also bleed ?
Hamlet ?

Or was it the Merchant of Venice ?