A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory,
Of calling shapes, and beck’ning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men’s names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
John Milton, Comus

Lord, I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing!
Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends sol’n forth of holy write,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil
Shakespeare, King Henry III

I prithee send me back my heart,
Since I cannot have thine;
For if from yours you will not part,
Why then shouldst thou have mine?
Sir John Suckling, Fragmenta Aurea

Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?
Marlowe, Hero and Leander

One Pinch, a hungry lean-fac’d villain,
A mere anatomy, a mountebank,
A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller
A needy, hollow-ey’d, sharp-looking wretch,
A living-dead man.
Shakespeare, King Richard III

Here are a few of the unpleasant’st words
That ever blotted paper.
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.
Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me.
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story
Shakespeare, Hamlet

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my good.
John Milton, Paradise Lost

I am but mad, north-northwest: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Death, death: O amiable, lovely death!
William Shakespeare, King John

Murder most foul, as in the best it is.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human
freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves
William Pitt

Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
John Milton, Paradise Lost

Canst thou not minister to a mind
diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Shakespeare, Macbeth