Troilus and Cressida Quotes

“For to be wise and love exceeds man's might.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“I am a bastard, too. I love bastards! I am bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valor, in everything illegitimate.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Thou sodden-witted lord! thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Farewell, bastard.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Modest doubt is call'd the beacon of the wise.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows!”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“He eats nothing but doves, love, and that breeds hot blood, and hot blood beget hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds, and hot deeds is love.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“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: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours;
For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.”
― Shakespeare, William, Troilus and Cressida

“My lord, will you be true?
Who, I? Alas, it is my vice, my fault:
Whiles others fish with craft for great opinion,
I with great truth catch mere simplicity;
Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns,
With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare.
Fear not my truth: the moral of my wit
Is "plain and true"; there's all the reach of it.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Prophet may you be!
If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
when time is old and hath forgot itself,
when waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
and blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
and mighty states characterless are grated
to dusty nothing, yet let memory,
from false to false, among false maids in love,
upbraid my falsehood!”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“But you are wise,
Or else you love not, for to be wise and love
Exceeds man's might; that dwells with gods above.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“The common curse of mankind, - folly and ignorance”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr'd; And I myself see not the bottom of it.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Pleasure and revenge have ears more deaf than adders to the voice of any true decision.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“we understand not one another: I am too courtly, and thou art too cunning. At”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Life every man holds dear; but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“This she? no, this is Diomed's Cressida:
If beauty have a soul, this is not she;
If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies,
If sanctimony be the gods' delight,
If there be rule in unity itself,
This is not she. O madness of discourse,
That cause sets up with and against itself!
Bi-fold authority! where reason can revolt
Without perdition, and loss assume all reason
Without revolt: this is, and is not, Cressid.
Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of this strange nature that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth,
And yet the spacious breadth of this division
Admits no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne's broken woof to enter.
Instance, O instance! strong as Pluto's gates;
Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven:
Instance, O instance! strong as heaven itself;
The bonds of heaven are slipp'd, dissolved, and loosed;
And with another knot, five-finger-tied,
The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,
The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics
Of her o'er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip; Nay, her foot speaks. Her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. [Ulysses—4.5.64–66]”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“The raven chides blackness.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Nothing, but our undertakings; when we vow to weep
seas, live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers; thinking
it harder for our mistress to devise imposition
enough than for us to undergo any difficulty imposed.
This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will
is infinite and the execution confined, that the
desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Blind fear, that seeing reason leads, finds safer footing than blind reason stumbling without fear: to fear the worst oft cures the worse.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Idol of idiot-worshippers!”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“In Troy, there lies the scene. From isles of Greece
The princes orgulous, their high blood chaf’d,”
― William Shakespeare, The History of Troilus and Cressida: Love, War, and Betrayal in a Shakespearean Tragedy

“Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeath you my diseases.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Perchè essere saggi e innamorati è al di sopra del potere dell'uomo.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“Lussuria, lussuria; sempre guerra e lussuria; non c'è nient'altro che rimanga di moda.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“This is the most despiteful'st gentle greeting
The noblest hateful love, that e'er I heard of. - Paris”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“O, when degree is shak'd,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong—
Between whose endless jar justice resides—
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“أيها القلب..أيها القلب المثقل بالحزن
لم تتأوه وتنفطر؟
ثم يكون جوابه :
لأنك لا تستطيع أن تخفف من لوعتك
بالشكوى إلى صديق أو بالإفصاح.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida