Twelfth Night Quotes

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.

I would I had bestowed that time in the tongues, that I have in fencing, dancing and bear-baiting: O, had I but followed the arts!

Thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman's part.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

He is very well-favored and he speaks very shrewishly; one would think his mother's milk were scarce out of him.

Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave
And leave the world no copy.

Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out 'Olivia!' O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me.

What is love? Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter:
What's to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty:
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

My purpose, indeed, is a horse of that color.

Let still the woman take
An elder than herself: so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart:
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women's are.

Now the melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal.

Viola: My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.
Orsino: And what's her history?
Viola: A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

Now is the woodcock near the gin.

I may command where I adore.

Be not afraid of greatness: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.

This fellow's wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.

O world! how apt the poor are to be proud.

Why, this is very midsummer madness.

Go hang yourselves all! You are idle shallow things; I am not of your element.

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

Give me thy hand
And let me see thee in thy woman's weeds.

Why have you suffered me to be imprisoned,
Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest,
And made the most notorious geck and gull
That e'er invention played on? Tell me why.

I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you.