Famous Quotations from Love's Labour's Lost

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register'd upon our brazen tombs
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
The endeavour of this present breath may buy
That honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge,
And make us heirs of all eternity. (1.1.1)

Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in living art. (1.1.13)

These are barren tasks, too hard to keep,
Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep! (1.1.48)

Painfully to pore upon a book
To seek the light of truth; while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look. (1.1.73)

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,
That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks;
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books.
These earthly godfathers of Heaven's lights
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are. (1.1.84)

How well he's read, to reason against reading! (1.1.94)

At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled mirth;
But like of each thing that in season grows. (1.1.105)

A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain. (1.1.164)

Fashion's own knight. (1.1.176)

Assist me some extemporal god of rime, for I am sure I shall turn sonneter.
Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio. (1.2.192)

Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye,
Not uttered by base sale of chapmen's tongues. (2.1.15)

A merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour's talk withal. (2.1.68)

Delivers in such apt and gracious words
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
And younger hearings are quite ravished;
So sweet and voluble is his discourse. (2.1.78)

Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire. (2.1.119)

Warble, child; make passionate my sense of hearing. (3.1.1)

By my penny of observation. (3.1.25)

A wightly wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes;
Ay, and, by heaven, one that will do the deed
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard:
And I to sigh for her! to watch for her!
To pray for her! (3.1.206)

He hath not fed of the dainties that are bred in a book;
he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink. (4.2.25)

Old Mantuan! old Mantuan! Who understandeth thee not, loves thee not. (4.2.102)

Many can brook the weather that love not the wind. (4.2.37)

You two are book-men. (4.2.38)

Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye,
'Gainst whom the world cannot hold argument,
Persuade my heart to this false perjury?
Vows for thee broke deserve not punishment. (4.3.60)

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They are the ground, the books, the academes,
From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. (4.3.302)

But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain,
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices. (4.3.327)

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world. (4.3.350)

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. (5.1.18)

Priscian! a little scratched, 't will serve. (5.1.31)

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. (5.1.39)

In the posteriors of this day, which the rude multitude call the afternoon. (5.1.96)

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical; these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation:
I do forswear them. (5.2.407)

They have measured many a mile
To tread a measure with you on this grass. (5.2.88)

A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it. (5.2.869)

When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men. (5.2.902)

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You, that way: we, this way. (5.2.938)