To thine own self be true

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— /I took the one less travelled by, /And that has made all the difference.

Yet knowing how way leads on to way, /I doubted if I should ever come back.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogeneous society because I want the cream to rise.

We love the things we love for what they are.

The world would not find me changed from him they knew—/Only more sure of all I thought was true.

The afternoon knows what the morning never expected.

In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

The words are lovely, dark and deep /But I have promises to keep, /And miles to go before I sleep, /And miles to go before I sleep.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

The most creative thing is to believe in a thing.

…what to make of a diminished thing.

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body—the wishbone.

What we live by, we die by.

Ah, when to the heart of man /Was it ever less than a treason /To go with the drift of things, /To yield with a grace to reason, /And bow and accept the end /Of a love or a season?

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired.

Nothing gold can stay.

Some say the world will end in fire Some say ice.

It looked as if a night of dark intent /Was coming and not only a night, an age. /Someone had better be prepared for rage.

There would be more than ocean-water broken /Before God’s Put out the Light was spoken.

What design of darkness to appall? /If design govern in a thing so small?

I have a mind myself and recognize /Mind when I meet with it.

I may return /If dissatisfied /With what I learn /From having died.

Earth’s the right place for love /I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

From what I’ve tasted of desire /I hold with those who favour fire.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

You don’t have to deserve a mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

We shall be known by the delicacy of where we stop short.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

I’d hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

Never be bullied in silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.

Good fences make good neighbors.

It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.

You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.

It couldn’t be called ungentle /But how thoroughly departmental.

The only certain freedom’s in departure.

How many things would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?

I have it in me so much nearer home /To scare myself with my own desert places.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know /What I was walling in or walling out.

If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

All the fun is how you say anything.

I’m not confused, I’m just well-mixed.

The best way out is always through.

I believe in teaching, but I don’t believe in going to school.

I am not a teacher, but an awakener.

How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in.

To be social is to be forgiving.

A jury consists of the twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.

An idea is a feat of association and the height of it is a good metaphor.

The artist in me cries out for design.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

The ear is the only writer and the only true reader.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.

I never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

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.

…………………………………………………………………………….

“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

In Deena Hinshaw’s case in 2021, it was a bonus 228K on top of her 363K for doing and saying what Kenney wanted, not what was best for the public.

The Wisdom of Arthur Miller

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.

Our greatest Canadian hero in recent times.

Terry’s bloodied sock; he reinjured himself until he could run no more.

The van which his friend Doug drove.

The Thunder Bay, ON marker where his run came to a sudden painful end.

“And the hapless soldiers sigh
Run in blood down Palace walls”
–“London”, from Songs of Experience

A timeless Blake image/comment about kings, governments, and dictators abusing other humans with their power agendas. There are still many governments today with blood on their hands: U.S., North Korea, Russia, China, et al. Plus ca change.

“I consume; therefore, I am.”

Over in South Korea and Russia, the credo is: “I am a cannon-fodder patriot; therefore, I am.”

Ah, yes, indeed, what higher purposes do human beings have and aspire to?

Trump has lied about everything. He claimed that he lost hundreds of friends in 9/11 and there has never been any evidence of this.

He also let the Saudis off easy when Khashoggi was tortured and chopped up; he refused to hold them accountable one iota.

Now he is hosting a LIV event a mere 58 miles from 9/11 ground zero. Zero sensitivity to 9/11 victims. A hypocritical, shameless bigot, the only thing he respects is big money.

PGA golfers supporting the Saudi LIV should, likewise, be totally ashamed–notably Phil Mickelson–for selling out for money and ignoring the serious Saudi sins mentioned above.
Biden, too, for his irrational fist pump when he visited their country recently.

Golf’s image has been tarnished again; much as by once-hero Gary Player’s support of apartheid in South Africa for years when he was in his prime in the ’60s and ’70s. Rude behaviors in tournaments, homophobic comments and now the LIV controversy. Golf, a supposed ‘gentleman’s sport’, has taken several significant, disgraceful hits overall recently.

It’s the perfect time to donate food, or even better, donate money for them to buy the specific foods they need to help others. Now is no time to let our city’s poor perish in the crazy heat. Mad my donation online this morning. Easy-peasy. Didn’t hurt a bit and will do real social good for others.

(In terms of social action, I have long believed that financial donations to charities is the simplest, no-brainer way to help others out. A good way to overcome apathy and too-selfish-rampant cheapness.)

before the latter died to say how much he admired his book. But he also told Orwell that Brave New World was more like the future in that individuals would end up as cogs in a machine-like organization and that technology and overpopulation would lead to tyranny and totalitarian control.