As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have; but, in their stead, / Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, / Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not" (5.3.25-28).
William ShakespeareRead
Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark, what discord follows!
Interpretation
Removing balance or moderation leads to chaos and disharmony.
In this quote, Shakespeare emphasizes the importance of balance and order in life. The metaphor of a stringed instrument illustrates how even slight alterations can lead to discord and imbalance, suggesting that varying degrees of moderation are crucial for harmony in our actions and relationships.
In practice
In a speech about teamwork, one could use this quote to emphasize the need for balance among team members.
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have; but, in their stead, / Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, / Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not" (5.3.25-28).
Love bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Good company, good wine, good welcome, can make good people.
Absence doth sharpen love, presence strengthens it; the one brings fuel, the other blows it till it burns clear.
Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!
Give it an understanding, but no tongue.
A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.
We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.
People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are poor.
You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.
It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.
Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.
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