English

• Theseus: 'To live a barren sister all your life, Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.'
• Theseus: 'But earthlier happy is the rose distilled Than that which withering on the virgin thorn Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.'
• Lysander: 'The course of true love never did run smooth.'
• Lysander: 'Or, if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentany as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream; Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say "Behold!" The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion.'
• Bottom: 'Masters, spread yourselves.'
• Bottom: 'This is Ercles' vein, a tyrant's vein.'
• Flute: 'Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming.'
• Bottom: 'I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove; I will roar you, as 'twere any nightingale.'
• Peter Quince: 'a sweet-face man; a proper man, as one shall see in a summer's day.'
• Fairy: 'Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere.'
• Fairy: 'cowslips The cowslips tall her pensioners be: In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours: I must go seek some dewdrops here And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.'
• Puck: 'I am that merry wanderer of the night.'
• Oberon: 'Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.'
• Oberon: 'And the imperial votaress passed on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free. Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound, And maidens call it Love-in-idleness.'
• Puck: 'I'll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes.'
• Helena: 'my heart / Is true as steel'
• Titania: 'Sing me now asleep; Then to your offices and let me rest.'
• Oberon: 'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.'
• Fairy: 'You spotted snakes with double tongue, Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen; Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong, Come not near our fairy queen.'
• Fairy: 'Weaving spiders, come not here; Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence! Beetles black, approach not near; Worm nor snail, do no offence.'
• Bottom: 'a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing'
• Puck: 'What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here, So near the cradle of the fairy queen?'
• Quince: 'Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated.'
• Titania: 'What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?'
• Titania: 'Out of this wood do not desire to go.'
• Puck: 'Lord, what fools these mortals be!'
• Helena: 'all the counsel that we two have shared, The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent, When we have chid the hasty-footed time For parting us, —O, is it all forgot? All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence? We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds, Had been incorporate. So we grow together, So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition; Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart'
• Helena: 'O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd! She was a vixen when she went to school; And though she be but little, she is fierce.'
• Puck: 'night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger; At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there, Troop home to churchyards'
• Puck: 'Cupid is a knavish lad, Thus to make poor females mad.'
• Puck: 'Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill; The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.'
• Bottom: 'I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.'
• Titania: 'My Oberon! what visions have I seen! Methought I was enamoured of an ass.'
• Bottom: 'I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.'
• Bottom: 'The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.'
• Theseus: 'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: 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. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!'
• Theseus: 'Merry and tragical! tedious and brief! That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.'
• Quince: 'To show our simple skill, That is the true beginning of our end.'
• Quince: 'Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade, He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast.'
• Theseus: 'The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.'