Virtue itself ‘scapes not calumnious strokes.
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
If you have hitherto conceal’d this sight, Let it be tenable in your silence still; And whatsoever else shall hap to-night, Give it an understanding, but no tongue.
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth.
When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.
What then? what rests? Try what repentance can: what can it not? Yet what can it when one can not repent? O wretched state! O bosom black as death! O limed soul, that, struggling to be free, Art more engaged!
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! !n apprehension, how like a god!
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?
To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.
To be, or not to be, that is the question.
