A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Famous quotes

• The course of true love never did run smooth.

  In context

  • Love

• O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes!

  Act I, Scene I, spoken by HermiaIn context

  • Love

• Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
  Brief as the lightning in the collied night
  That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
  And, ere a man hath power to say, ‘Behold!’
  The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
  So quick bright things come to confusion.

  Act I, Scene I, spoken by LysanderIn context

  • Love
  • Time

• Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
  And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.

  In context

  • Love

• I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove; I will roar you an ’twere any nightingale.

  Act I, Scene II, spoken by BottomIn context

  • Acting
  • Comedy

• I am that merry wanderer of the night.

  Act II, Scene I, spoken by PuckIn context

• I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
  In forty minutes.

  Act II, Scene I, spoken by PuckIn context

  • Time

• We cannot fight for love as men may do.
  We should be woo’d, and were not made to woo.

  Act II, Scene I, spoken by HelenaIn context

  • Love
  • Women

• I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
  Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
  Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
  With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.

  Act II, Scene I, spoken by OberonIn context

  • Nature

• Lord, what fools these mortals be!

  Act III, scene ii.In context

  • Intelligence

• Cupid is a knavish lad
  Thus to make poor females mad.

  Act III, Scene II, spoken by PuckIn context

  • Comedy
  • Love

• I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.

  Act IV, Scene I, spoken by BottomIn context

  • Comedy
  • Sleep

• Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
  More than cool reason ever comprehends.

  Act V, Scene I, spoken by TheseusIn context

  • Love
  • Thinking

• It’s not enough to speak, but to speak true.

  In context

  • Truth & Lies

• The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

  Act V, Scene I, spoken by TheseusIn context

  • Acting
  • Art

• The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve.
  Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.

  Act V, Scene I, spoken by TheseusIn context

  • Time

• If we shadows have offended,
  Think but this, and all is mended,
  That you have but slumber’d here
  While these visions did appear.

  Act V, Scene I, spoken by PuckIn context

  • Acting
  • Sleep

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