King Lear Quotes Flashcards
‘Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks’
Lear (Act 4, Scene 6)
‘HIs breading, sir, hath been at my charge. I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am brazed to’t’
Gloucester to Kent (Act 1, Scene 1)
‘Sir, I love you more than…eyesight, space and liberty…’
Goneril to Lear (Act 1, Scene 1)
‘We make thee lady’
Lear to Goneril (Act 1, Scene 1)
‘Our dearest Regan, wife of Cornwall? Speak.’
Lear to Regan (Act 1, Scene 1)
‘Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her.’
Lear (Act 1, Scene 1)
‘Whom I have ever honoured as my king, loved as my father, as my master followed…’
Kent to Lear (Act 1, Scene 1)
‘Out of my sight!’
‘See better Lear’
Lear and Kent (Act 1, Scene 1)
‘Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor… most loved, despised’
France to Cordelia (Act 1, Scene 1)
‘Why brand us with ‘base’, with ‘baseness’, ‘bastardy’…within a dull, stale, tired bed…Well then, legitimate Edgar, I must have your land’
Edmund’s soliloquy (Act 1, Scene 2)
‘O villain, villain: his very opinion in the letter!’
Gloucester (Act 1, Scene 2)
‘These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us…there’s son against father; the king falls from bias nature: there’s father against child’
Gloucester (Act 1, Scene 2)
‘This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion’
Edmund’s soliloquy (Act 1, Scene 2)
‘A credulous father; a brother noble, whose nature is so far from doing harms that he suspects none - on whose foolish honesty my practices ride easy… Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit’
Edmund’s soliloquy (Act 1, Scene 2)
‘By day and night he wrongs me. Every hour he flashes into one gross crime…I’ll not endure it.’
Goneril to Oswald (Act 1, Scene 3)
‘I do profess to be no less than I seem’
Caius to Lear (Act 1, Scene 4)
‘…as poor as the king’ ‘…thou art poor enough’
Caius and Lear (Act 1, Scene 4)
‘You have that countenance which I would fain call master…Authority’
Caius to Lear (Act 1, Scene 4)
‘Contending with foul elements; bids the wind blow the earth into the sea…his little world of man’
Gentleman (Act 3, Scene 1)
‘None but the Fool, who labours to out-jest his heart-struck injuries’
Gentleman (Act 3, Scene 1)
‘Into this scattered kingdom, who already, wise in our negligence, have secret feet in some of our best ports…’
Kent (Act 3, Scene 1)
‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, Till you have drenched our steeple, drowned the cocks!’
Lear to the storm (Act 3, Scene 2)
‘…court holy-water…ask thy daughters blessing…’
Fool to Lear (Act 3, Scene 2)
‘I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness: I never gave you kingdom, called you children; you owe me no subscripton…Here I stand your slave, a poor, infirm, week and despised old man’
Lear to the storm (Act 3, Scene 2)
‘…that’s a wise man and a fool’
Fool to Caius (Act 3, Scene 2)
‘I am a man more sinned against than sinning’
Lear (Act 3, Scene 2)
‘Poor fool and kanve, I have one part in my heart that’s sorry for thee yet’
Lear (Act 3, Scene 1)
‘When priests are more in word than matter; when brewers mar theur malt with water; when nobles are their tailors’ tutors; then shall the relm of Albion…’
Fool (Act 3, Scene 2)
‘A king, a king!’
Lear to Poor Tom (Act 3, Scene 6)
‘He chlded as I fathered’
Poor Tom’s soliloquy (Act 3, Scene 6)
‘[Regan plucks Gloucester’s beard]’
Stage directions (Act 3, Scene 7)
