“When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner”

“Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk! When that this body did contain a spirit a kingdom for it was to small a bound. But now two paces of the vilest earth are room enough”

“Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alikeFeeds beast as man.”

“And thus I clothe my naked villainyWith odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ;And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.”

“When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store;When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away.This thought is as a death which cannot chooseBut weep to have that which it fears to lose.”

“I have not slept.Between the acting of a dreadful thingAnd the first motion, all the interim isLike a phantasma, or a hideous dream:The Genius and the mortal instrumentsAre then in council; and the state of man,Like to a little kingdom, suffers thenThe nature of an insurrection.”

“I will play the swan. And die in music.”