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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

We come to bury DOS, not to praise it.
(Paul Vojta, vojta@math.berkeley.edu, paraphrasing a quote of Shakespeare)
A horse!  A horse!  My kingdom for a horse!
                -- Wm. Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
A light wife doth make a heavy husband.
                -- Wm. Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
A Tale of Two Cities LITE(tm)
        -- by Charles Dickens

        A lawyer who looks like a French Nobleman is executed in his place.

The Metamorphosis LITE(tm)
        -- by Franz Kafka

        A man turns into a bug and his family gets annoyed.

Lord of the Rings LITE(tm)
        -- by J.R.R. Tolkien

        Some guys take a long vacation to throw a ring into a volcano.

Hamlet LITE(tm)
        -- by Wm. Shakespeare

        A college student on vacation with family problems, a screwy
        girl-friend and a mother who won't act her age.
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
                -- H.L. Mencken, on Shakespeare
Alas, how love can trifle with itself!
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona"
All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.
                -- Shakespeare, "Merchant of Venice"
Always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.
                -- William Shakespeare, "As You Like It"
An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.
                -- Shakespeare, "King Lear"
At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement,
especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously
-- I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being
in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason.
                -- John Keats
But, for my own part, it was Greek to me.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar"
Conscience doth make cowards of us all.
                -- Shakespeare
Delay not, Caesar.  Read it instantly.
                -- Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar" 3,1

Here is a letter, read it at your leisure.
                -- Shakespeare, "Merchant of Venice" 5,1

        [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when
         referring to I/O system services.]
Every cloud engenders not a storm.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
Every why hath a wherefore.
                -- William Shakespeare, "A Comedy of Errors"
Extreme fear can neither fight nor fly.
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Rape of Lucrece"
For a light heart lives long.
                -- Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost"
For courage mounteth with occasion.
                -- William Shakespeare, "King John"
For years a secret shame destroyed my peace--
I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNiece.
But now I think a thought that brings me hope:
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.
                -- Justin Richardson.
Harp not on that string.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
Having nothing, nothing can he lose.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his
argument.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost"
He hath eaten me out of house and home.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV"
He jests at scars who never felt a wound.
                -- Shakespeare, "Romeo and Juliet, II. 2"
He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Taming of the Shrew"
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
                -- Wm. Shakespeare, "The Tempest"
How apt the poor are to be proud.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Twelfth-Night"
I do desire we may be better strangers.
                -- William Shakespeare, "As You Like It"
I dote on his very absence.
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
I've touch'd the highest point of all my greatness;
And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting.  I shall fall,
Like a bright exhalation in the evening
And no man see me more.
                -- Shakespeare
It is a wise father that knows his own child.
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
Kiss me, Kate, we will be married o' Sunday.
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Taming of the Shrew"
Lay on, MacDuff, and curs'd be him who first cries, "Hold, enough!".
                -- Shakespeare
Let him choose out of my files, his projects to accomplish.
                -- Shakespeare, "Coriolanus"
Let me take you a button-hole lower.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost"
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
                -- William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer-Night's Dream"
Must I hold a candle to my shames?
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
                -- William Shakespeare, "Romeo and Juliet"
"Not Hercules could have knock'd out his brains, for he had none."
                -- Shakespeare
O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
                -- Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure", II, 2
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
                -- Shakespeare
Patch griefs with proverbs.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Much Ado About Nothing"
question = ( to ) ? be : ! be;
                -- Wm. Shakespeare
Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV"
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar"
Small things make base men proud.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
So so is good, very good, very excellent good:
and yet it is not; it is but so so.
                -- William Shakespeare, "As You Like It"
Something's rotten in the state of Denmark.
                -- Shakespeare
Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.
                -- Wm. Shakespeare
Talkers are no good doers.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
Tempt not a desperate man.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Romeo and Juliet"
The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar"
The bay-trees in our country are all wither'd
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change.
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.
                -- Wm. Shakespeare, "Richard II"
The better part of valor is discretion.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV"
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Much Ado About Nothing"
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
                -- Wm. Shakespeare, "Henry VI", Part IV
The Least Successful Collector
        Betsy Baker played a central role in the history of collecting.  She
was employed as a servant in the house of John Warburton (1682-1759) who had
amassed a fine collection of 58 first edition plays, including most of the
works of Shakespeare.
        One day Warburton returned home to find 55 of them charred beyond
legibility.  Betsy had either burned them or used them as pie bottoms.  The
remaining three folios are now in the British Museum.
        The only comparable literary figure was the maid who in 1835 burned
the manuscript of the first volume of Thomas Carlyle's "The Hisory of the
French Revolution", thinking it was wastepaper.
                -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact...
                -- Wm. Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost"
The ripest fruit falls first.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Richard II"
The smallest worm will turn being trodden on.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
                -- Wm. Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
There's small choice in rotten apples.
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Taming of the Shrew"
They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost"
Things past redress and now with me past care.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Richard II"
This night methinks is but the daylight sick.
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
This was the most unkindest cut of all.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar"
To be or not to be.
                -- Shakespeare
To do is to be.
                -- Nietzsche
To be is to do.
                -- Sartre
Do be do be do.
                -- Sinatra
Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues
of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the blessed sun himself
a fair, hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst
be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.  I wasted time and now doth
time waste me.
                -- William Shakespeare
You may my glories and my state dispose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Richard II"
You tread upon my patience.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV"
Zounds!  I was never so bethumped with words
since I first called my brother's father dad.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Kind John"
Remember thee
Ay, thou poor ghost while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.  Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there.
Hamlet, I : v : 95   William Shakespeare
Remember thee
Ay, thou poor ghost while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.  Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there.
                -- William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
  Parting is such sweet sorrow. -William Shakespeare
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.  -William Shakespeare
        In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to
his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's
kill all the lawyers."  That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment
was expressed by Thomas K. Connellan, president of The Management Group, Inc.
Speaking to business executives in Chicago and quoted in Automotive News,
Connellan attributed a measure of America's falling productivity to an excess
of attorneys and accountants, and a dearth of production experts.  Lawyers
and accountants "do not make the economic pie any bigger; they only figure
out how the pie gets divided.  Neither profession provides any added value
to product."
        According to Connellan, the highly productive Japanese society has
10 lawyers and 30 accountants per 100,000 population.  The U.S. has 200
lawyers and 700 accountants.  This suggests that "the U.S. proportion of
pie-bakers and pie-dividers is way out of whack."  Could Dick Butcher have
been an efficiency expert?
                -- Motor Trend, May 1983
To kick or not to kick...
        -- Somewhere on IRC, inspired by Shakespeare
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2024
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