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.
As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.
The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance.
There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.
Film is important; it can be more than reportage or a novel - it creates images people have never seen before, never imagined they'd see, maybe because they needed someone else to imagine them.
I always knew that if I was ever going to perform something that I wrote in front of an audience, I was going to do the thing I most like to experience as an audience member, which is to be tricked.
As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.
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