Famous Quotations from 2 Henry IV

Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it. (Induction 15)

See what a ready tongue suspicion hath!
He that but fears the thing he would not know
Hath by instinct knowledge from others' eyes
That what he fear'd is chanced. (1.1.85)

Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news
Hath but a losing office, and his tongue
Sounds ever after as a sullen bell,
Remembered knolling a departed friend. (1.1.103)

The whiteness in thy cheek
Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand.
Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone,
Drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night,
And would have told him half his Troy was burnt. (1.1.120)

The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything
that tends to laughter, more than I invent or is invented on me:
I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.
I do here walk before thee like a sow that hath overwhelmed all her litter but one. (1.2.8)

A rascally yea-forsooth knave. (1.2.40)

Some smack of age in you,
some relish of the saltness of time. (1.2.67)

Your lordship, though not clean past your youth,
hath yet some smack of age in you,
some relish of the saltness of time. (1.2.114)

This apoplexy is, as I take it, a kind of lethargy,
an't please your lordship;
a kind of sleeping in the blood, a whoreson tingling. (1.2.132)

It is the disease of not listening,
the malady of not marking,
that I am troubled withal. (1.2.141)

Virtue is of so little regard in these
costermonger times that true valour is turned
bear-herd: pregnancy is made a tapster, and hath
his quick wit wasted in giving reckonings: all the
other gifts appertinent to man, as the malice of
this age shapes them, are not worth a gooseberry. (1.2.160)

Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek,
a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly?
Is not your voice broken, your wind short,
your chin double, your wit single,
and every part about you blasted with antiquity,
and will you yet call yourself young?
Fie, fie, fie, Sir John! (1.2.207)

My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon,
with a white head, and something of a round belly.
For my voice, I have lost it with hollaing, and singing of anthems. (1.2.214)

Chief justice God send the prince a better companion!
Falstaff God send the companion a better prince!
I cannot rid my hands of him. (1.2.227)

It was always yet the trick of our English nation,
if they have a good thing, to make it too common. (1.2.243)

I were better
to be eaten to death with rust than
to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion. (1.2.248)

I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse:
borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable. (1.2.269)

When we mean to build,
We first survey the plot, then draw the model;
And when we see the figure of the house,
Then we must rate the cost of the erection;
Which if we find outweighs ability,
What do we then but draw anew the model
In fewer offices, or at last desist
To build at all? (1.3.42)

A hundred mark is a long one for a poor
lone woman to bear; and I have borne, and borne, and borne;
and have been fubbed off,
and fubbed off, and fubbed off, from this day to that day,
that it is a shame to be thought on. (2.1.37)

Away, you scullion! you rampallion! you fustilarian!
I'll tickle your catastrophe. (2.1.68)

Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet,
sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table,
by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week. (2.1.98)

Doth it not show vilely in me to desire small beer? (2.2.8)

Let the end try the man. (2.2.53)

He was indeed the glass
Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves. (2.2.22)

Shall pack-horses,
And hollow pampered jades of Asia,
Which cannot go but thirty miles a day,
Compare with Caesars, and with Cannibals,
And Trojan Greeks? nay, rather damn them with
King Cerberus; and let the welkin roar. (2.4.177)

Thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig,
when wilt thou leave fighting o' days, and foining o' nights,
and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven? (2.4.250)

Is it not strange that desire should
so many years outlive performance? (2.4.284)

O sleep! O gentle sleep!
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh mine eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lulled with sound of sweetest melody? (3.1.6)

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. (3.1.32)

O God! that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea! (3.1.45)

O! if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die. (3.1.55)

There is a history in all men's lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, which in their seeds
And weak beginnings lie intreasurèd. (3.1.81)

A soldier is better accommodated than with a wife. (3.2.74)

Most forcible Feeble. (3.2.182)

We have heard the chimes at midnight. (3.2.232)

I care not; a man can die but once;
we owe God a death. (3.2.253)

He that dies this year is quit for the next. (3.2.257)

Lord, Lord! how subject we old men
are to this vice of lying. (3.2.330)

When a' was naked, he was, for all the world,
like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved
upon it with a knife. (3.2.336)

Talks as familiarly of John a Gaunt
as if he had been sworn brother to him. (3.2.349)

Against ill chances men are ever merry,
But heaviness foreruns the good event. (4.2.89)

That I may justly say with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome,
'I came, saw, and overcame.' (4.3.45)

A man cannot make him laugh;
but that's no marvel; he drinks no wine. (4.3.96)

Skill in the weapon is nothing without sack,
for that sets it a-work; and learning, a mere hoard of gold kept
by a devil till sack commences it and sets it in act and use. (4.3.120)

If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle
I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations. (4.3.134)

O polished perturbation! golden care!
That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide
To many a watchful night! Sleep with it now!
Yet not so sound, and half so deeply sweet
As he whose brow with homely biggin bound
Snores out the watch of night. (4.5.24)

This sleep is sound indeed; this is a sleep
That from this golden rigol hath divorced
So many English kings. (4.5.35)

Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought. (4.5.92)

Commit
The oldest sins the newest kind of ways. (4.5.126)

It hath been prophesied to me many years
I should not die but in Jerusalem,
Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land.
But bear me to that chamber; there I'll lie:
In that Jerusalem shall Harry die. (4.5.236)

Any pretty little tiny kickshaws, tell William Cook. (5.1.30)

This is the English, not the Turkish court;
Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,
But Harry, Harry. (5.2.48)

Sorrow so royally in you appears,
That I will deeply put the fashion on. (5.2.52)

My father is gone wild into his grave. (5.2.124)

'Tis merry in hall when beards wag all. (5.3.37)

A foutra for the world, and worldlings base!
I speak of Africa and golden joys. (5.3.101)

I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dreamed of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane. (5.5.52)

Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gourmandising; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men. (5.5.60)

Presume not that I am the thing I was. (5.5.62)

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