Shakespeare Revenge Quotes & Sayings

I'll find a day to massacre them all
And raze their faction and their family,
The cruel father and his traitorous sons,
To whom I sued for my dear son's life,
And make them know what 'tis to let a queen
Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain. — William Shakespeare

OTHELLO Not Cassio kill'd! then murder's out of tune, And sweet revenge grows harsh. DESDEMONA O, falsely, falsely murder'd! — William Shakespeare

(aside) Oh, you are well tuned now,
But I'll set down the pegs that make this music,
As honest as I am. — William Shakespeare

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? — William Shakespeare

If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. — William Shakespeare

You cannot make gross sins look clear: To revenge is no valour, but to bear. — William Shakespeare

If I can catch him once upon the hip, I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him. — William Shakespeare

Work is the undoing of nature. — Paul Majkut

His jest shall savour but a shallow wit, when thousands more weep than did laugh it. — William Shakespeare

Then if thou hast
A heart of wreak in thee, that wilt revenge
Thine own particular wrongs and stop those maims
Of shame seen through thy country, speed
thee straight,
And make my misery serve thy turn: so use it
That my revengeful services may prove
As benefits to thee, for I will fight
Against my canker'd country with the spleen
Of all the under fiends. — William Shakespeare

To hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation — William Shakespeare

Coleridge's description of Iago's actions as "motiveless malignancy" applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian villains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive, and, secondly, that the motive is not the desire for personal revenge upon another for a personal injury. Iago himself proffers two reasons for wishing to injure Othello and Cassio. He tells Roderigo that, in appointing Cassio to be his lieutenant, Othello has treated him unjustly, in which conversation he talks like the conventional Elizabethan malcontent. In his soliloquies with himself, he refers to his suspicion that both Othello and Cassio have made him a cuckold, and here he talks like the conventional jealous husband who desires revenge. But there are, I believe, insuperable objections to taking these reasons, as some critics have done, at their face value. — W. H. Auden

The whirligig of time brings in his revenges. — William Shakespeare

At this hour
Lie at my mercy all mine enemies. — William Shakespeare

Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, Blood and revenge are hammering in my head — William Shakespeare

You know your mother means to feast with me,
And calls herself Revenge, and thinks me mad:
Hark, villains! I will grind your bones to dust
And with your blood and it I'll make a paste,
And of the paste a coffin I will rear
And make two pasties of your shameful heads,
And bid that strumpet, your unhallow'd dam,
Like to the earth swallow her own increase.
This is the feast that I have bid her to,
And this the banquet she shall surfeit on; (5.2.18) — William Shakespeare

A kiss, long as my exile, as sweet as my revenge. — William Shakespeare

Shakespeare wrote about love. I write about love. Shakespeare wrote about gang warfare, family feuds and revenge. I write about all the same things. — Sister Souljah

O, a kiss
Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!
Now, by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss I carried from thee, dear, and my true lip
Hath virgined it e'er since. — William Shakespeare

And where the offense is, let the great axe fall. — William Shakespeare

Hark, villains! I will grind your bones to dust. (Act V, Scene 2, 2503) — William Shakespeare

Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind,
And makes it fearful and degenerate;
Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep. — William Shakespeare

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? — William Shakespeare

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord?
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it.
[The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.] — William Shakespeare

In thee thy mother dies, our household's name, My death's revenge, thy youth, and England's fame. — William Shakespeare

Let's make us med'cines of our great revenge, To cure this deadly grief. — William Shakespeare

By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present, Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold. The most convincing way of showing this was to ask playgoers to keep both plays in mind at once, to experience a new Hamlet while memories of the old one, ghostlike, still lingered. Audiences at the Globe soon found themselves, like Hamlet, straddling worlds and struggling to reconcile past and present. — James Shapiro

And Caesar's spirit, raging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial. — William Shakespeare

Kindness nobler ever than revenge. — William Shakespeare

Pleasure and revenge
Have ears more deaf than adders to the voice
Of any true decision. — William Shakespeare

Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause,
But since I am a dog, beware my fangs. — William Shakespeare

How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, 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. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd — William Shakespeare

Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the shores of thought; within which were all the tides and waves of destiny and will; over which swept all the storms of fate, ambition and revenge; upon which fell the gloom and darkness of despair and death and all the sunlight of content and love, and within which was the inverted sky lit with the eternal stars
an intellectual ocean
toward which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles and continents of thought receive their dew and rain. — Robert Green Ingersoll

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. — William Shakespeare

No place indeed should murder sanctuarize; Revenge should have no bounds. — William Shakespeare

Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane,
Drink off this potion! — William Shakespeare

IAGO: She that was ever fair and never proud,
Had tongue at will and yet was never loud,
Never lack'd gold and yet went never gay,
Fled from her wish and yet said 'Now I may,'
She that being anger'd, her revenge being nigh,
Bade her wrong stay and her displeasure fly,
She that in wisdom never was so frail
To change the cod's head for the salmon's tail;
She that could think and ne'er disclose her mind,
See suitors following and not look behind,
She was a wight, if ever such wight were,
DESDEMONA: To do what?
IAGO: To suckle fools and chronicle small beer. — William Shakespeare

She is your treasure, she must have a husband;
I must dance bare-foot on her wedding day
And for your love to her lead apes in hell.
Talk not to me: I will go sit and weep
Till I can find occasion of revenge.
— William Shakespeare

For the gods know I
speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge — William Shakespeare

If thou didst ever thy dear father love - Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder — William Shakespeare