William Shakespeare

Good and Evil

Evil is a quality the agent chooses and declares for, sometimes with full knowledge of its being evil, and the plays trace its growth from small motions of envy and resentment into the ruin of whole households.

Love

The love that rests on trust is as powerful for ruin as for good, and the mind which had once believed can be turned by careful insinuation to the belief which destroys it.

Emotion

The passions are not accidents of the soul but the substance of the action, and the tragedies show what an emotion, once given free course, will do to the man who has not learned to master it.

Honor

Honor is what a man is known to be by those whose recognition he has earned, and when that recognition is withdrawn or falsified the loss is not to be distinguished from the loss of the man himself.

Tyranny

The tyrant is made by the act that makes him, and the act that secured the throne corrupts the ruling that follows, so that the tyranny is not imposed from outside upon the man but consumes him from within.

Family

The bonds of parent and child, once broken by ingratitude or mistrust, are not easily mended, and the disorders of the family work themselves out across the lives of its members as a ruin that gathers before it can be understood.

Sin

A sin once committed is not annulled by remorse, and the conscience that asks for forgiveness while clinging to the fruits of the act discovers that no prayer can reach the place where the will is still bent upon the wrong.

Fate

The prophecy and the stars are among the causes that work upon a man, but the decisive cause is his own act, which he performs in their name and which would not have been done without him.

Will

The will, even when convinced of what it must do, may hesitate, qualify itself, and exhaust itself in reflection, so that deliberation and resolve are not one faculty but two at war within the same breast.

Rhetoric

The speech which can turn a crowd is not in the first place an argument but a handling of the crowd's own feelings, offered in the form of a man who has come not to make a case but only to bury the dead.

Life and Death

To live is to be troubled by the prospect of an end that may be only sleep and may be a dream, and the thought of that uncertainty is itself among the heavier burdens of being alive.