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
I must be cruel, only to be kind.
Interpretation
Sometimes being harsh is necessary for the greater good.
This quote from Shakespeare suggests that in certain situations, one may need to act with apparent cruelty in order to ultimately benefit another person. It reflects the idea that tough love and difficult actions can lead to positive outcomes, emphasizing the complexity of human relationships and moral choices.
In practice
In a discussion about tough decision-making, one might quote Shakespeare to illustrate the necessity of hard choices.
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.
And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside.
A principle is the expression of perfection, and as imperfect beings like us cannot practise perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice.
Charity is great, but the moment you say it is all, you run the risk of running into materialism.
The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves.
The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
Menstruation not only carries with it the connotation of a productive system that has failed to produce; it also carries the idea of production gone awry, making products of no use, not to specification, unsalable, wasted, scrap.
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