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.
Life knows us not and we do not know lifeβ-we donβt know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow
What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?
You can know all there is to know about life and mankind, but what do you really know about yourself?
To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.
We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying degrees, return again and again.
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
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