The catalogue is deliberately loose: some are famous single lines, some are longer passages, some are jokes; all of them sit close to the questions the plays are actually asking. Play · act.scene notation follows the standard Arden references.

"To be, or not to be - that is the question."

Hamlet, alone, weighing existence itself. The play's whole gravity in one line.

"This above all: to thine own self be true."

Polonius to his son Laertes - one of the few times the old windbag gets a line worth quoting.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - anticipates Stoic and Buddhist psychology by centuries.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Hamlet to Horatio, after meeting the ghost. The whole modern anti-scientism argument compressed to a line.

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty…"

And ending: "and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" The soaring hymn followed by the puncturing line. Renaissance humanism and its shadow in one speech.

"The rest is silence."

Hamlet's last words. Four syllables that hold the whole play.

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day…"

Macbeth on learning of Lady Macbeth's death. "Life's but a walking shadow… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The bleakest speech in English literature; and yet the way it is written is not bleak.

"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it."

Malcolm on the traitor Cawdor's execution. A tribute to a well-met death.

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Jaques' famous "seven ages of man" speech - infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, second childhood. A whole life-map in twenty-eight lines.

"Sweet are the uses of adversity."

Duke Senior in the Forest of Arden, arguing that exile is a teacher.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

Prospero, dissolving the wedding masque. Shakespeare's most Vedāntic line - māyā spoken from inside māyā.

"O brave new world, that has such people in't!"

Miranda seeing other humans for the first time. Aldous Huxley took the phrase for his 1932 novel, permanently ironizing it.

"Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once."

Caesar to Calpurnia, dismissing her warnings - hours before he is killed. Shakespeare loves an ironic set-up.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Cassius to Brutus. The line that eventually gave John Green his novel title.

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport."

Gloucester, blinded, on the heath. The most theologically dark line Shakespeare ever wrote - the play never fully answers it.

"Nothing will come of nothing."

Lear to Cordelia when she refuses to flatter him. The play's first hinge - everything after grows from that "nothing".

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."

Malvolio, reading the forged letter that will undo him. Comic in context, endlessly quotable out of it.

"If music be the food of love, play on."

Orsino's opening line - melancholy dressed as sensuality.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

Juliet at the balcony. The whole play argues she is wrong: names carry armies and kill people.

"These violent delights have violent ends."

Friar Laurence, before performing the marriage. A warning ignored.

"The quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath."

Portia in the courtroom, disguised as a young lawyer. Meant to save Antonio; it also seals Shylock's ruin.

"How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world."

Portia, back in Belmont - the play trying, imperfectly, to end kindly.

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers."

Henry V rallying his troops at Agincourt on Saint Crispin's Day. Still the model for the pre-battle speech in every English-language film that has one.

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."

Henry IV, sleepless, on the price of power.

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety."

Enobarbus on Cleopatra. Possibly the greatest character sketch ever written by a man about a woman he had never met.

"When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married."

Benedick, watching himself fall in love and narrating the fall in real time.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate."

The most famous opening in English poetry. And its promise: "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." Four hundred years and counting.

"Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds."

The definition of love as the fixed mark, "the star to every wandering bark, / Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."

"When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state…"

The whole arc of the sonnet is the argument: the misery is undone by remembering one true thing - "and then my state, / Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate."

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past…"

Proust took his English title from this line. What memory does to a life.

"The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way; we this way."

The play's actual last line - one of the strangest endings in the canon. The revels are broken off by a death and everyone walks away. Apollo (music, harmony) yields to Mercury (news, message, mortality). Two thousand pages of criticism start here.

"A jest's prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the tongue of him that makes it."

Rosaline to Berowne. Shakespeare on how meaning lands - the listener is half the work. Applies to every teaching that has ever tried to reach across a room.

"The weight of this sad time we must obey; / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."

Edgar's final couplet - the play's last spoken instruction. A closing note that could preface any honest conversation.

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun, / Nor the furious winter's rages."

The funeral song sung over Imogen, thought dead. Virginia Woolf quotes it repeatedly in Mrs Dalloway - a line that seems to know something about the other side of death that the play never quite says.

The father-and-son linguists rebuilding how Shakespeare actually sounded.

David Crystal - British linguist, Honorary Professor at Bangor, author of ~120 books on the English language including The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, The Stories of English, How Language Works, and Pronouncing Shakespeare. His life's work has been the popular study of English - dialect, punctuation, spelling reform, texting, and the historical evolution of the sound of the language.

Ben Crystal - his son, actor and Shakespearean, co-author with David of Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion - the standard reference for reading the plays with the original vocabulary intact.

Together they pioneered the modern Original Pronunciation (OP) movement - reconstructing how Shakespeare's English actually sounded around 1600, and staging plays in it. The revelation is that dozens of puns and rhymes only work in OP, and vanish in modern Received Pronunciation. Once you hear it, you cannot unhear it - the plays get funnier, faster, and more physical.

→ Watch: David & Ben Crystal on how Shakespeare's English actually sounded (YouTube Short).

Thanks to Dame Sarah Spring for making people aware of the Crystals' work.