Timon Of Athens Quotes

Like madness is the glory of this life.

The moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.

I’ll beat thee, but I should infect my hands.

It is a much wiser policy to plant acre after acre of orchids and lead one's life in solitude encompassed by their sheltering stems, than to surround oneself with the hoi-polloi and so court the same pointless misanthropic disgust as befell Timon of Athens.

Men must learn now with pity to dispense; For policy sits above conscience.

Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon!

Timon will to the woods, where he shall find Th' unkindest beast more kinder than mankind. The gods confound - hear me, you good gods all - Th' Athenians both within and out that wall! And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow To the whole race of mankind, high and low! Amen.

My heart is ever at your service

How came the noble Timon to this change? TIMON: As the moon does, by wanting light to give: But then renew I could not, like the moon; There were no suns to borrow of.

Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft: Seek not my name: a plague consume you wicked caitiffs left! Here lie I, Timon; who, alive, all living men did hate: Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait.

It is a much wiser policy to plant acre after acre of orchids and lead one's life in solitude encompassed by their sheltering stems, than to surround oneself with the hoi polloi and so court the same pointless misanthropic disgust as befell Timon of Athens. Society is forever holding forth about fairness and justice. If it really believes these to be of such importance, it might do well to kill off a few dozen petty criminals per day, and use their carcasses to fertilize and give life to countless fields of flowers.

Great Timon, noble, worthy, royal Timon! Ah, when the means are gone that buy this praise, The breath is gone whereof this praise is made: Feast-won, fast-lost; one cloud of winter showers, These flies are couch'd.

O my good lord, the world is but a word: Were it all yours to give it in a breath, How quickly were it gone!

Who lives that's not depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears not one spurn to their graves Of their friends' gift? I should fear those that dance before me now Would one day stamp upon me: 't has been done; Men shut their doors against a setting sun.

It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one's sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he coauthored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher).

Worthy Timon,-- TIMON Of none but such as you, and you of Timon.

O, what a precious comfort 'tis, to have so many, like brothers, commanding one another's fortunes!

I'll lock thy heaven from thee. O, that men's ears should be To counsel deaf, but not to flattery!

The wonderful things are over

Lips, let sour words go by and language end: What is amiss plague and infection mend! Graves only be men's works and death their gain! Sun, hide thy beams! Timon hath done his reign.

Who seeks for better of thee, sauce his palate With thy most operant poison! What is here? Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods, I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens! Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. Ha, you gods! why this? what this, you gods? Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads: This yellow slave Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed, Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench: this is it That makes the wappen'd widow wed again;

A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee t' attain to! If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat three: if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee, when peradventure thou wert accused by the ass: if thou wert the ass, thy dulness would torment thee, and still thou livedst but as a breakfast to the wolf: if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner: wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury: wert thou a bear, thou wouldst be killed by the horse: wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seized by the leopard: wert thou a leopard, thou wert german to the lion and the spots of thy kindred were jurors on thy life: all thy safety were remotion and thy defence absence. What beast couldst thou be, that were not subject to a beast? and what a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation!

I’ll example you with thievery: The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun; The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief, That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen From general excrement: each thing’s a thief.

Why, this is the world's soul; and just of the same piece Is every flatterer's spirit. Who can call him His friend that dips in the same dish? for, in My knowing, Timon has been this lord's father, And kept his credit with his purse, Supported his estate; nay, Timon's money Has paid his men their wages: he ne'er drinks, But Timon's silver treads upon his lip; And yet — O, see the monstrousness of man When he looks out in an ungrateful shape!— He does deny him, in respect of his, What charitable men afford to beggars.

Immortal gods, I crave no pelf; I pray for no man but myself: Grant I may never prove so fond, To trust man on his oath or bond; Or a harlot, for her weeping; Or a dog, that seems a-sleeping: Or a keeper with my freedom; Or my friends, if I should need 'em. Amen. So fall to't: Rich men sin, and I eat root.

A fool of thee: depart. APEMANTUS I love thee better now than e'er I did. TIMON I hate thee worse.

I do wish thou were a dog, that I might love thee something.

The swallow follows not summer more willing than we your lordship. TIMON (aside) Nor more willingly leaves winter. Such summer birds are men.

Madness is the glory of this life

The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic; he cross'd himself by't; and I cannot think but, in the end, the villainies of man will set him clear.

Let our drums strike.

ليس ثمة مَن يعطي بحق، إن كان يأمل أن يستعيد.

كل شيء منحرف. لا شيء مستقيمًا في طباعنا اللعينة سوى النذالة الصُّراح. لذا فليحل المقت بجميع الحفلات وبالاجتماعات وبجموع البشر.

ira furor brevis est;

O you gods, what a number of men eat Timon, and he sees 'em not! It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man's blood; and all the madness is, he cheers them up too. I wonder men dare trust themselves with men: Methinks they should invite them without knives; Good for their meat, and safer for their lives. There's much example for't; the fellow that sits next him now, parts bread with him, pledges the breath of him in a divided draught, is the readiest man to kill him: 't has been proved. If I were a huge man, I should fear to drink at meals;

I'm worse than mad: I have kept back their foes, While they have told their money and let out Their coin upon large interest, I myself Rich only in large hurts. All those for this? Is this the balsam that the usuring senate Pours into captains' wounds? Banishment!

Your greatest want is, you want much of meat. Why should you want? Behold, the earth hath roots; Within this mile break forth a hundred springs; The oaks bear mast, the briers scarlet hips; The bounteous housewife, nature, on each bush Lays her full mess before you. Want! why want?

Look thee, 'tis so! Thou singly honest man, Here, take: the gods out of my misery Have sent thee treasure. Go, live rich and happy; But thus condition'd: thou shalt build from men; Hate all, curse all, show charity to none, But let the famish'd flesh slide from the bone, Ere thou relieve the beggar; give to dogs What thou deny'st to men; let prisons swallow 'em, Debts wither 'em to nothing; be men like blasted woods, And may diseases lick up their false bloods! And so farewell and thrive. FLAVIUS O, let me stay, And comfort you, my master. TIMON If thou hatest curses, Stay not; fly, whilst thou art blest and free: Ne'er see thou man, and let me ne'er see thee.

Come, sermon me no further. No villainous bounty yet hath pass'd my heart; Unwisely, not ignobly, have I given. Why dost thou weep? Canst thou the conscience lack To think I shall lack friends? Secure thy heart; If I would broach the vessels of my love, And try the argument of hearts, by borrowing, Men and men's fortunes could I frankly use As I can bid thee speak.

Commend me to them, And tell them that, to ease them of their griefs, Their fears of hostile strokes, their aches, losses, Their pangs of love, with other incident throes That nature's fragile vessel doth sustain In life's uncertain voyage, I will some kindness do them: I'll teach them to prevent wild Alcibiades' wrath. First Senator I like this well; he will return again. TIMON I have a tree, which grows here in my close, That mine own use invites me to cut down, And shortly must I fell it: tell my friends, Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree From high to low throughout, that whoso please To stop affliction, let him take his haste, Come hither, ere my tree hath felt the axe, And hang himself. I pray you, do my greeting.

This is in thee a nature but infected; A poor unmanly melancholy sprung From change of fortune. Why this spade? this place? This slave-like habit? and these looks of care? Thy flatterers yet wear silk, drink wine, lie soft; Hug their diseased perfumes, and have forgot That ever Timon was. Shame not these woods, By putting on the cunning of a carper. Be thou a flatterer now, and seek to thrive By that which has undone thee: hinge thy knee, And let his very breath, whom thou'lt observe, Blow off thy cap; praise his most vicious strain, And call it excellent: thou wast told thus; Thou gavest thine ears like tapsters that bid welcome To knaves and all approachers: 'tis most just That thou turn rascal; hadst thou wealth again, Rascals should have 't. Do not assume my likeness.

let not thy sword skip one: Pity not honour'd age for his white beard; He is an usurer: strike me the counterfeit matron; It is her habit only that is honest, Herself's a bawd: let not the virgin's cheek Make soft thy trenchant sword; for those milk-paps, That through the window-bars bore at men's eyes, Are not within the leaf of pity writ, But set them down horrible traitors: spare not the babe, Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy; Think it a bastard, whom the oracle Hath doubtfully pronounced thy throat shall cut, And mince it sans remorse: swear against objects; Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes; Whose proof, nor yells of mothers, maids, nor babes, Nor sight of priests in holy vestments bleeding, Shall pierce a jot. There's gold to pay soldiers: Make large confusion; and, thy fury spent, Confounded be thyself! Speak not, be gone.

O, the fierce wretchedness that glory brings us! Who would not wish to be from wealth exempt, Since riches point to misery and contempt? Who would be so mock'd with glory? or to live But in a dream of friendship? To have his pomp and all what state compounds But only painted, like his varnish'd friends? Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart, Undone by goodness! Strange, unusual blood, When man's worst sin is, he does too much good! Who, then, dares to be half so kind again? For bounty, that makes gods, does still mar men. My dearest lord, bless'd, to be most accursed, Rich, only to be wretched, thy great fortunes Are made thy chief afflictions. Alas, kind lord! He's flung in rage from this ingrateful seat Of monstrous friends, nor has he with him to Supply his life, or that which can command it. I'll follow and inquire him out: I'll ever serve his mind with my best will; Whilst I have gold, I'll be his steward still.

O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce 'Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars! Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer, Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow That lies on Dian's lap! thou visible god, That solder'st close impossibilities, And makest them kiss! that speak'st with every tongue, To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts! Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue Set them into confounding odds, that beasts May have the world in empire!

1595, Richard Field, fellow-alumnus of the King Edward grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon, printed The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea: translated out of Greeke into French by James Amiot, abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the Kings privie counsell, and great Amner of France, and out of French into English, by Thomas North. This was the book that got Shakespeare thinking seriously about politics: monarchy versus republicanism versus empire; the choices we make and their tragic consequences; the conflict between public duty and private desire. He absorbed classical thought, but was not enslaved to it. Shakespeare was a thinker who always made it new, adapted his source materials, and put his own spin on them. In the case of Plutarch, he feminized the very masculine Roman world. Brutus and Caesar are seen through the prism of their wives, Portia and Calpurnia; Coriolanus through his mother, Volumnia; Mark Antony through his lover, Cleopatra. Roman women were traditionally silent, confined to the domestic sphere. Cleopatra is the very antithesis of such a woman, while Volumnia is given the full force of that supreme Ciceronian skill, a persuasive rhetorical voice.40 Timon of Athens is alone and unhappy precisely because his obsession with money has cut him off from the love of, and for, women (the only females in Timon’s strange play are two prostitutes). Paradoxically, the very masculinity of Plutarch’s version of ancient history stimulated Shakespeare into demonstrating that women are more than the equal of men. Where most thinkers among his contemporaries took the traditional view of female inferiority, he again and again wrote comedies in which the girls are smarter than the boys—Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Rosalind in As You Like It, Portia in The Merchant of Venice—and tragedies in which women exercise forceful authority for good or ill (Tamora, Cleopatra, Volumnia, and Cymbeline’s Queen in his imagined antiquity, but also Queen Margaret in his rendition of the Wars of the Roses).41

Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.” Consider Shakespeare: we’re most familiar with a small number of his classics, forgetting that in the span of two decades, he produced 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Simonton tracked the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, measuring how often they’re performed and how widely they’re praised by experts and critics. In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works—Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello—he also churned out the comparatively average Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well, both of which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development. In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Orchestra chose the 50 greatest pieces of classical music, the list included six pieces by Mozart, five by Beethoven, and three by Bach. To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand. In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit. Picasso’s oeuvre includes more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings, not to mention prints, rugs, and tapestries—only a fraction of which have garnered acclaim. In poetry, when we recite Maya Angelou’s classic poem “Still I Rise,” we tend to forget that she wrote 165 others; we remember her moving memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and pay less attention to her other 6 autobiographies. In science, Einstein wrote papers on general and special relativity that transformed physics, but many of his 248 publications had minimal impact. If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” Across fields, Simonton reports that the most prolific people not only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.* Between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, Edison pioneered the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon telephone. But during that period, he filed well over one hundred patents for other inventions as diverse as stencil pens, a fruit preservation technique, and a way of using magnets to mine iron ore—and designed a creepy talking doll. “Those periods in which the most minor products appear tend to be the same periods in which the most major works appear,” Simonton notes. Edison’s “1,093 patents notwithstanding, the number of truly superlative creative achievements can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Save thee, Timon. Tim. Now, thieves? All [Banditti]. Soldiers, not thieves. Tim. Both too, and women's sons. All [Banditti]. We are not thieves, but men that much do want. Tim. Your greatest want is, you want much of meat. Why should you want? Behold, the earth hath roots; Within this mile break forth a hundred springs; The oaks bear mast, the briers scarlet hips; The bounteous housewife, nature, on each bush Lays her full mess before you. Want! why want? 1. Ban. We cannot live on grass, on berries, water, As beasts and birds and fishes. Tim. Nor on the beasts themselves, the birds, and fishes; You must eat men. Yet thanks I must you con That you are thieves profess'd, that you work not In holier shapes: for there is boundless theft In limited professions. Rascal thieves, Here's gold. Go, suck the subtle blood o' the grape, Till the high fever seethe your blood to froth, And so 'scape hanging: trust not the physician; His antidotes are poison, and he slays Moe than you rob: take wealth and lives together; Do villany, do, since you protest to do't, Like workmen. I'll example you with thievery. The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun: The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief, That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen From general excrement: each thing's a thief: The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power Have uncheque'd theft. Love not yourselves: away, Rob one another. There's more gold. Cut throats: All that you meet are thieves: to Athens go, Break open shops; nothing can you steal, But thieves do lose it: steal no less for this I give you; and gold confound you howsoe'er! Amen. 3. Ban. Has almost charmed me from my profession, by persuading me to it. 1. Ban. 'Tis in the malice of mankind that he thus advises us; not to have us thrive in our mystery. 2 Ban. I'll believe him as an enemy, and give over my trade. 1 Ban. Let us first see peace in Athens: there is no time so miserable but a man may be true. Exeunt Thieves [the Banditti]

Is the sun dimmed that gnats do fly in it?

أي شيء على وجه البسيطة أرذل من أصدقاء يمكنهم الوصول بأنبل العقول إلى أوطأ النهايات؟!

إن الذي يحب أن يداهَن له جدير بالمداهِن.

مَن ذا يعيش غير مقذوف أو قاذف؟ مَن ذا يموت ولا يحمل إلى قبره قذفة أرسلها إليه صديق؟

من المؤسف ألا يكون للكَرَم عيونٌ في الخلف، لتمنع المرءَ عن تعاسةٍ سببها كَرَمُ نفسِه وسخاؤها.

It turns out that when people assess your skills, they put more weight on your peaks18 than on your troughs. Even if you happened to see Serena Williams repeatedly double-fault on her serve, you’d recognize her excellence if you witnessed just one of her aces. When Steve Jobs flopped with the Apple Lisa, people still deemed him a visionary for his feats with the Mac. And we judge Shakespeare’s genius by his masterpieces (think Hamlet and King Lear), forgiving his forgettable plays (I’m looking at you, Timon of Athens and The Merry Wives of Windsor). People judge your potential from your best moments, not your worst. What if you gave yourself the same grace?

Almost inevitably, all natural phrases of common origin soon begin to take on the hue of a deliberate allusion, if you wish it to do so. However, that way madness lies and one gets excited by the possibility of the line, “And the poet and the painter far behind his rightful time”7 in ‘Chimes of Freedom’ referring to the poet and the painter in Timon of Athens. Still, this reverberation demonstrates how it is impossible not to make such direct connections at times, especially when something chimes so well in your mind.