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
Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
Interpretation
The quote questions the nature of reality and perception, suggesting that our thoughts can create illusions.
In this quote, Shakespeare explores the idea that what we perceive may not be real but rather manifestations of our own troubled minds. The metaphor of a 'dagger of the mind' implies that our thoughts can lead us to dark and dangerous places, reflecting on how the imagination can create illusions that feel as real as tangible objects.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of reality in a psychology class.
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.
Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.
There's one thing better than having a great actor, and that's having a great actor who's never done this kind of role before and is hungry to do it. They're testing themselves every day. They want to get out of their trailer and get to work.
For me, it is freedom, freedom from everything: when I write, I'm not a woman. I'm not a Muslim. I'm not a Moroccan. I can reinvent myself, and I can reinvent the world.
You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.
Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
When the punk thing came along and I heard my friends saying, I hate these people with the pins in their ears. I said, Thank God, something got their attention.
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