To thine own self be true

our daily Trump Dump, thanks to limited/limiting media.

There are many quotable lines and speeches taken from Shakespeare: “Beware the Ides of March”, “It was Greek to me” , “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”, but some have a greater ring of truth than others and I have selected some below which have stood out for or influenced me significantly. A veritable mine of wisdom and life lessons here.

…………………………………………………………………………….

“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.” -Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Nothing can come of nothing.” -King Lear

“Can one desire too much of a good thing? -As You Like It

“True it is that we have seen better days.” -As You Like It

“Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.” -Romeo and Juliet

“True nobility is exempt from fear.” -Henry VI, Part II

“I bear a charmed life.” -Macbeth

“The play’s the thing.”
–Hamlet

“The native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
-Hamlet

“There is a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.”
-Hamlet

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
-The Tempest

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
-As You Like It

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
-Midsummer Night’s Dream

“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
-Julius Caesar

“What’s gone and what’s past help
Should be past grief.”
-Winter’s Tale

“Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.”
-Hamlet

“Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.”
-Henry VI, Part II

“Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement.”
-Hamlet

“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
-Hamlet

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”
-Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.”
-Twelfth Night

“To hold, as t’were, the mirror up to nature.”
-Hamlet

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
-Troilus and Cressida

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
-Hamlet

“I am a man
More sinn’d against than sinning.”
-King Lear

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
-Hamlet

“To thine own self be true.”
-Hamlet

“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
-Hamlet

“For I am nothing if not critical.”
-Othello

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”
-Twelfth Night

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.”
-As You Like It

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d…
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”
-The Merchant of Venice

“We have heard the chimes at midnight.”
-Henry IV, Part II

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions!”
-Hamlet

“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it”
-Twelfth Night

“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
-A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“In delay there lies no plenty.”
-Twelfth Night

“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”
-Macbeth

“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.
Which we ascribe to heaven.”
-All’s Well That Ends Well

“All that live must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.”
-Hamlet

“Use every man after his desert and who would ‘scape whipping?”
-Hamlet

“We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.”
-Hamlet

“The readiness is all.”
-Hamlet

“The time of life is short;
To spend that shortness basely were too long.”
Henry IV, Part 2

“O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend,
The brightest heaven of invention.”
-Henry V

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
-Julius Caesar

“But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.”
-Julius Caesar

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child!”
-King Lear

“I am tied to the stake, and must stand the course.”
-King Lear

“The wheel is come full circle.”
-King Lear

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
-Macbeth

“Nothing is, But what is not.”
-Macbeth

“There’s nothing serious in mortality.”
-Macbeth

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death,
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
-Macbeth

“Men should be what they seem,”
-Othello

“Then you must speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well.”
-Othello

“He jests at scars, that never felt a wound.”
-Romeo and Juliet

“These violent delights have violent ends.”
-Romeo and Juliet

“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in ‘t!”
-The Tempest

“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state.”
-Sonnet 29

“Haply I think on thee–and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
that then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
-Sonnet 29

“Not marble, nor gilded monuments
of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”
-Sonnet 55

“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or tends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark.”
-Sonnet 116

“Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.”
-Sonnet 116

“The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.
-Sonnet 129

“All that glisters is not gold.”
-Merchant of Venice

“The dog will have his day.”
-Hamlet

“Thereby hangs a tale.”
-Taming of the Shrew

“If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well
it were done quickly.”
-Macbeth

“Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
-Twelfth Night

“I must be cruel only to be kind.”
-Hamlet

“I am not what I am.”
-Othello

“For ’tis sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard”
-Hamlet

“More matter with less art”
-Hamlet

“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.”
-Hamlet

“There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”
-Hamlet

“Who steals my purse steals trash.”
-Othello

“But I have that within which passes show.’
-Hamlet

“I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means to do ‘t.”
-Hamlet

“The time is out of joint–O cursed spite,
that ever I was born to set it right!”
-Hamlet

“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”
-Hamlet

“What’s done, is done.”
-Macbeth

“The whirligig of time”
-Twelfth Night

“Now is the winter of our discontent”
-Richard III

The Wit and Wisdom of GBS

George Bernard Shaw Quotes:

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

You see things, you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.

The best way to get your point across is to entertain.

Animals are my friends. I don’t eat my friends.

Youth is wasted on the young.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

The biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes, but in never making the same one a second time.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

He knows nothing, and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

All great truths start as blasphemies.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honour.

We learn from experience that man can never learn anything from experience.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and, at last, you create what you will.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes might not be the same.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby.

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery–it’s the sincerest form of learning.

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.

There is always danger for those who are afraid.

The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

I don’t know what I think until I write it.

There is only one religion, though a hundred versions of it.

I have my own soul. My own spark of divine fire.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

She had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Most people go to their grave with their music inside them.

He who has never hoped can never despair.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

We are all savages.

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them.

From a very early age, I’ve had to interrupt my education to go to school.

A man’s interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself.

Old men are dangerous; it does not matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

We don’t stop playing because we get old—we grow old because we stop playing.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who don’t have it.

Without good manners and humour, society would be intolerable and impossible.

Alcohol is the anaesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

If a writer says what he has to say as accurately and effectively as he can, his style will take care of itself.

A soldier always assumes that he is going to shoot, not to be shot.

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.

I want to be all used up when I die.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

Those who cannot their minds cannot change anything.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

The things that most people want to know are usually none of their business.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Yesterday is the past, tomorrow is the future, today is a gift—that’s why it’s called the present.

who predicted many of the global changes, rebellions, dictatorships and abuses that have come to pass. 1984 and Animal Farm are simply must-reads for 21st century citizens globally.

(Many people out there do their damnedest to avoid thinking. It is hard to be conscious if one does not think. For me, Miller is one of several major writers who raised my own personal bar of consciousness.)

Certain things have to be, the sun has to rise.

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

I am still feeling kinda temporary about myself.

All you can do is your best at any one moment.

I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one’s self.

Your fate is your character.

You are you. There was never another guy like you. There will never be another guy like you again. You are like most people in most respects, but in some one respect you aren’t; but in some small way what you think and see is unique. There can only be one of you.

Nobody’s view of themselves is the same as the view of others of them.

It is quite obvious to me that we can’t begin to get the impact of a person without setting him in his time, in the context of the main drift of events that he has lived through.

In other words, we are born private and we die private, but we live of necessity in direct relation to other people, even if we live alone.

I used the phrase years ago that the fish is in the water and the water is in the fish. Man is in society, but the society is in man and every individual.

If you believe that life is worth living, then your belief will create the fact.

The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity.

Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

However, perhaps ninety percent of the population is still concerned with satisfying needs more primitive than those of self-actualization.

We romanticize the past a lot.

When you remember something, you remember clusters, clusters of images, clusters of feelings, one feeling invokes another, and the calendar has nothing to do with it. When you think back, a scent, or a vision of some kind just speeds through the calendar with the speed of light.

What ideology, I wondered, was not based on a principled denial of the facts?

The truth is a synthesis of the facts.

No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.

You suddenly realized that the great leaders of society were full of hot air. The thing was built on smoke.

There is in all of us a retrograde desire to kill, to destroy—a love of the dark and that we have a lot of forces that keep us from doing it most of the time. And when a leadership arises in the country that believes it can lead by using the darkness in man it’s probably unstoppable at a certain point.

There are certain men in the world who would rather see everybody hung before they will take the blame.

But when you are absolutely right and everybody else is wrong. I have to get off the train.

An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

If, however, he measures [spiritual fulfillment] in terms of enjoying a sunrise, being warmed by a child’s smile, or being able to help someone have a better day, then he is likely to know much spiritual fulfillment.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

You can’t eat an orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit.

Everybody forgets everything; that’s the law of life.

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order—for meaning.

A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.

…Until you can give up your innocence, you are very open to crime, to becoming part of crime. The problem with crime is that the people who commit it cannot conceive of themselves as the ones who commit the crime. In one way or another, we are all victims—one man of his family, another man of society, another man of whatever and if it’s going to the limitation of the vision, then we are really finished because everybody can justify anything on the basis that he is only paying the world for what it did to him. If there is an enemy, so to speak of man, it is the idea of innocence.

The number of ways of evading looking in the mirror are infinite now. You can buy a car, a house, change your family. A lot of people don’t need to confront themselves because of the fact there are so many escapes in the commodity civilization.

You deny the murder in you. You deny the complicity with evil….That’s evil, we’re good. We do not do bad things. [By that point] you are ready to sacrifice somebody.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds come home to roost.

Most of what man tries to do doesn’t work.

I do think that most things end badly…Most human enterprise disappoints. But in the interval between inactivity and that disappointment, between starting something and realizing it’s in vain, we can accomplish a great deal.

We’re going to have to pay for every advance that is made.

We are using a higher part of the brain when we have to listen to language. You only have to sit there to enjoy a movie.

I think language is the most subtle thing we’ve got, the most subtle means of expression. I don’t think images are as subtle as that.

Plays usually move on the feet of language, and most films that are any good depend primarily upon a succession of images, which is quite a different thing and should be.

In the theatre, everything comes through words and gesture, but the basic thing is the word. The word is a higher development in mankind’s evolution than the picture.

(re. image) It’s a more primitive activity of the brain, in my opinion, than language, which is difficult for us.

A playwright is partly an actor. And you are projecting your acting skills on other characters.…Playwriting is an auditory skill…Characters are projections of the author.

Any relationship between people…takes longer to do on screen if you want conclusion and subtlety.

I think movies are attempting to reproduce the dream situation.

Film reduces everything to what it is. On stage, things can take on a metaphorical meaning or significance. They have an implicit poetic quality. On the screen, it seems to me, they have more of what they are in real life.

Casting in movies is really the most important part of the picture. The picture lives or dies the day you cast an actor.

The audience in a theatre edits, to a certain extent, what they see. When you have two/three/four people on stage, you have to decide who to focus on. In a movie that’s all decided for you.

There’s a lot of talk about American theatre. We have shows. That’s not a theatre…the theatre of the Bottom Line.

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world.

While my heart beats, my head is going to be asking questions.

What does a writer want? He wants to leave his thumbprint on the world.

I think art imputes value to human beings.

I personally think that what the big writers have in common is a fierce moral sensibility, which is unquenchable and they are all burning with the same anger at the way the world is.

Comedy is probably a better balance of the way life is ‘cause it’s full of absurdities. And you can’t have too many absurdities in tragedy or it gets funny….Comedy is closer to the way we are.

Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.

“‘The Joker’ filming outside Trump grand jury courthouse”

The real Joker, of course, is Trump: evil, malicious, vengeful, corrupt to the gills. The movie news pales compared with Trump’s innumerable real crimes.

and entertaining others?”
“Yes.”
“And did you enjoy helping and offering help to others?”
“Yes.”
“Did you enjoy giving gifts to others?”
“Yes.”
“And did you enjoy teaching others and helping others to learn?”
“Yes. My individuality and individualism manifested themselves most of all in these kinds of choices on a regular basis. Looking back, I maintained my uniqueness regardless of how positively engaged I was, socially, long-term.”

and The Manfreds (1992-2023).

The Classic Core Record Albums

(The first and most famous album, 1964, gr. 10–I was introduced to by my oldest friend Hugh in his bedroom one Saturday.)

(1965: the other strong album.)

The CDs

(Best of the early hits.)

The 7 EP Collection

The Comprehensive 11 CD Boxset

More BBC Collections

The Manfreds 2 DVD Live Set

(original players, front row: left: Mike Hugg; red shirt: Mike D’Abo–2nd lead singer; black jacket: Paul Jones 1st lead singer; right: guitar–Tom Guinness)

Manfred Mann was named after their organ player. They started as a jazz duo (Hugg and Mann). Paul Jones gradually introduced them to rhythm and blues. Later, they had a jazz interlude during which Cream’s Jack Bruce joined them on bass. Then they became a pop group after Jones left and D’Abo took over the vocals. The Revolver album artist and part-time Beatles bass player Klaus Voorman also played bass for them in the D’Abo version.

After 1969, they morphed into less interesting versions–MM Chapter 3 and the MM Earth Band. But starting in 1992, The Manfreds iteration signified a return to the glory days of the original members playing live together.

Flag near Mara-Lago supporting Trump: “TRUMP OR DEATH”.

Now the ‘logic’ of that flag is….

Daughter’s pet today.