Ted > Ted's Quotes

“Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman

“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me”
― Gustave Flaubert

“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom”
― Gustave Flaubert, November

“For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Expectation is the root of all heartache.”
― William Shakespeare

“Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is! (Act 1, scene 1)”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2

“What's past is prologue.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.”
― Shakespeare, Hamlet

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“Many a true word hath been spoken in jest.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."

Which dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them,—Ding-dong, bell.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
― William Shakespeare, The Sonnets

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”
― William Shakespeare, Henry V

“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong.”
― Otto von Bismarck