- Lear: 1. I have full cause of weeping; but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!
- Cordelia: 1. Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty According to my bond; no more nor less.
- Cordelia: Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides: Who cover faults, at last shame them derides
- Edmund: 1. Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take More composition and fierce quality Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed, Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops Got 'tween asleep and wake?
- Gloucester: 1. We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves.
- Edmund: 1. This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!
- Fool: 1. Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink.
- Lear: 1. Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, More hideous, when thou show'st thee in a child Than the sea-monster!
- Kent: 1. I have seen better faces in my time, Than stands on any shoulder that I see Before me at this instant.
- Regan: 1. O, sir, you are old; Nature in you stands on the very verge Of her confine: you should be rul'd and led By some discretion, that discerns your state Better than you yourself.
- Lear: 1. Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous: Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life is cheap as beast's.
- Lear: 1. You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both! If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts Against their father, fool me not so much To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger, And let not women's weapons, water-drops, Stain my man's cheeks!
- Lear: 1. I will do such things, What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be The terrors of the earth.
- Fool: 1. He that has and a little tiny wit, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, Must make content with his fortunes fit, Though the rain it raineth every day.
- Lear: 1. Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O! I have ta'en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just.
- Edgar: 1. Child Rowland to the dark tower came, His word was still, -Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.
- Fool: He's mad, that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath
- Lear: 1. A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?
- Lear: 1. You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave: - Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead.
- Lear: 1. I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
- Lear: 1. Come, let's away to prison; We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; - And take upon's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by the moon.
- Lear: 1. Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so That heaven's vaults should crack. - She's gone for ever! - I know when one is dead, and when one lives; She's dead as earth.