Macbeth - Quotes

Ms Ní Chonfhaola

Macbeth
Quotes

____________________________

___ Leaving Certificate English 2014

Ms Ní Chonfhaola
Macbeth - Quotes
Ms Ní Chonfhaola
 Ambition and Power

Banquo: “To me you speak not. If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain
will grow and which will not, speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear your favors nor
your hate.” (1.3)
Macbeth: “My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, shakes so my single state of
man that function is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is but what is not.” (1.3)
Macbeth: (Aside) “The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step on which I must fall down, or else
o'erleap, for in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep
desires. The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”
(1.4) Lady Macbeth: “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be what thou art promised: yet
do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way: thou
wouldst be great; art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it” (1.5)
Macbeth: “I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which
o'erleaps itself and falls on the other. (1.7)
Ross: “'Gainst nature still! Thriftless ambition, that wilt ravin up thine own life's means! Then
'tis most like the sovereignty will fall upon Macbeth.” (2.4)
Banquo: “Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, As the weird women promised, and I
fear thou play'dst most foully for't” (3.1)
Banquo: "Yet it was said it should not stand in thy posterity, but that myself should be the
root and father of many kings.” (3.1)
Macbeth: “For mine own good all causes shall give way. I am in blood stepp'd in so far
that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er. (3.4)
Macbeth: “She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. To
morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last
syllable of recorded time and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out,
out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon
the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.” (5.5)
Macduff: “Either thou, Macbeth, or else my sword, with an unbatter'd edge, I sheathe
again undeeded.” (5.8)

Nature

Witches: Fair is foul and foul is fair (1.1)

Lady Macbeth: “Look like th’innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t.” (1.5) Lady
Macbeth: Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here and fill me from
the crown to the toe topfull of direst cruelty. (1.5)
Banquo: “Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed the air is delicate.”
(1.6) Banquo: There’s husbandry in heaven, their candles are all out. (2.1)
Macbeth: Macbeth does murder sleep. (2.2)
Lady Macbeth: I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry (2.2)
Lady Macbeth: It was the owl that shrieked. (2.2)
Macbeth: His gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature. (2.3)
Lennox: The night has been unruly. Where we lay, our chimneys were blown down and, as
they say, lamentings heard i' th' air, strange screams of death, and prophesying with accents
terrible of dire combustion and confused events, new hatched to the woeful time. (2.3)
Macbeth: ’Twas a rough night (2.3)
Old Man to Ross: Tis said, they eat each other. (2.4)
Ross: Gainst nature still. (2.4) (Ross discussing Duncan’s horses)
Old Man: Tis unnatural, even like the deed that’s done. (2.4)
Macbeth - Quotes
Ms Ní Chonfhaola
Appearance

Witches: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.” (1.1) Banquo:
“Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with
honest trifles, to betray's In deepest consequence” (1.3)
Macbeth: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” (1.3)
Duncan: “There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face: He was a gentleman
on whom I built an absolute trust.” (1.4)
Lady Macbeth: “Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters. To
beguile the time, look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue; look
like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.” (1.5)
Duncan: “See, see, our honour'd hostess! The love that follows us sometime is our
trouble, which still we thank as love. Fair and noble hostess, we are your guest to-night.”
(1.6) Macbeth: “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.” (1.7)
Macbeth: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let
me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to
feeling as to sight? Or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from
the heat oppressed brain?” (2.1)
Macduff: “Malcolm and Donalbain, the King's two sons, are stol'n away and fled, which
puts upon them suspicion of the deed.” (2.4)
Macbeth: “Let your remembrance apply to Banquo; present him eminence, both with eye
and tongue: unsafe the while, that we must lave our honours in these flattering streams,
and make our faces vizards to our hearts.” (3.2)
Lady Macbeth: “O proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear: this is the air-drawn
dagger which, you said, led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts, impostors to true fear,
would well become a woman's story at a winter's fire, authorized by her grandam. Shame
itself! Why do you make such faces? When all's done, you look but on a stool.” (3.4)
Macbeth: “Let your remembrance apply to Banquo; / Present him eminence, both with eye
and tongue: / Unsafe the while, that we / Must lave our honours in these flattering streams, /
And make our faces vizards to our hearts.” (3.4)
First Apparition: (an armed head) “Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth! Beware Macduff, Beware
the Thane of Fife. Dismiss me. Enough.” (4.1)
Third Apparition: “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to
high Dunsinane Hill
shall come against him” (4.1)
Macbeth: “"And be these juggling fiends no more believed, that palter with us in a double
sense; that keep the word of promise to our ear, and break it to our hope” (5.8)

Violence
 Duncan: “What bloody man is that? He can report, as seemeth by his plight, of the revolt
the newest state.” (1.2)
Captain: “For brave Macbeth —well he deserves that name — disdaining fortune, with his
brandish'd steel, which smoked with bloody execution, like valour's minion carved out his
passage till he faced the slave; which ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him, Till he
unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps, and fix'd his head upon our battlements.” (1.2)
Lady Macbeth: “I have given suck and know how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks
me- I would, while it was smiling in my face, have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless
gums and dash'd the brains out had I so sworn as you have done to this. (1.7)
Macbeth: “The castle of Macduff I will surprise, seize upon Fife, give to the edge o' the sword
his wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls that trace him in his line.” (4.1)
Macduff: “Each new morn new widows howl, new orphans cry” (4.3)

Macbeth - Quotes
Ms Ní Chonfhaola
Characters - Macbeth

Captain: “Brave Macbeth” / “Valour’s minion” (1.2)

Duncan: “Valiant cousin” / “Noble Macbeth” (1.2)
Banquo: “Rapt withal” (1.3)
Macbeth: “The prince of Cumberland: that is a step on which I must fall down, or else o’erleap
for in my way it lies.” (1.4)
Lady Macbeth: “Yet do I fear thy nature, it is too full o’th’milk of human kindness to catch
the nearest way” (1.5)
Macbeth: “I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition
which o’erleaps itself and fall on th’other” (1.7)
Macbeth: “I could not say ‘Amen’” (2.2)
Macbeth: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?”
(2.2) Macbeth: “To be thus is nothing but to be safely thus” (3.1)
Macbeth: “Restless ecstasy” (3.2)
Macbeth: “Thou canst not say I did it; never shake thy gory locks at me!”
(3.4) Macbeth: “What man dare, I dare” (3.4)
Macbeth: “From this moment, the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of
my hand.” (4.1)
Macbeth: “To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done.” (4.1)
Malcolm: “Tyrant” (4.3)
Macbeth: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
(5.5) Macduff: “Bloodier villain than terms can give out.” (5.8)
Malcolm: “Dead butcher” (5.8)
Macduff: “Hell hound” (5.8)

Characters - Banquo
 Banquo: “’What! can the devil speak true?” (1.3)
Macbeth: “You not hope your children shall be kings, when those that gave the Thane of
Cawdor to me promised no less to them?” (1.3)
Banquo: “And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths,
win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence.” (1.3)
Banquo: “A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, and yet I would not sleep: merciful
powers, restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature, gives way to in repose!” (2.1)
Banquo: “And question this most bloody piece of work, to know it further. Fears and scruples
shake us:
In the great hand of God I stand, and thence, against the undivulged pretence I fight,
of treasonous malice.” (2.3)
Banquo: Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all, as the weird women promised, and, I
fear, thou play'dst most foully for’t” (3.1)

Characters - The Witches

Witches: “Fair is foul and foul is fair” (1.1)

Banquo: “Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths.” (1.3)

Charles Lamb says of them that ‘they are foul anomalies, of whom we know not where they are
sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so
they seem to be without human relations. The come with thunder and lightning, and vanish to
airy music.’

Macbeth - Quotes
Ms Ní Chonfhaola
Characters - Lady Macbeth

Macbeth: “Dearest chuck” (3.2)

Lady Macbeth: “Dearest partner of greatness” (1.5)
Lady Macbeth: (reading Macbeth’s letter) “Hie thee hither, that I may pour my spirits in thine
ear and chastise with the valour of my tongue all that impedes thee from the golden round.”
(1.5) Lady Macbeth: “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here and fill
me from the crown to the toe topfull of direst cruelty.” (1.5)
Lady Macbeth: “When you durst do it, then you were a man.” (1.7)
Lady Macbeth: “But screw your courage to the sticking-place and we’ll not fail.” (1.7) Lady
Macbeth: “Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t.” (2.2) Lady Macbeth:
“Naught’s had, all’s spent, where our desire is got without content. Tis safer to be that which
we destroy, than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.” (3.2)
Lady Macbeth: “What’s to be done?” (3.2)
Lady Macbeth: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” (5.1)
Lady Macbeth: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” (5.1)
Doctor: “More needs she the divine than the physician” (5.1)

Imagery - Blood
 Lady Macbeth: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” (5.1)
Macduff: “Bleed, bleed, poor country.” (4.3)
Macbeth: “Thou canst not say I did it; never shake thy gory locks at me!”
(3.4) Macbeth: His gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature.” (2.3)

Imagery - Light and Darkness

Macbeth: “Stars, hide your fires, let not light see my black and deep desires” (1.4) Lady
Macbeth: “Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife
see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry "Hold,
hold!” (1.5)
Banquo: “There’s husbandry in heaven; their candles are all out.” (2.1)
Ross: “By the clock, ‘tis day, any yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.”
(2.4) Macbeth: “Come, seeling night, scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day” (3.2)
Macbeth: “Out, out, brief candle! and ‘I gin to be aweary of the sun” (5.5)

Imagery - Sleep

Macbeth: “Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more,
Macbeth shall sleep no more” (2.2)
Macbeth: “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, the death of each life’s day,
sore labour’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in
life’s feast” (2.2)
Lady Macbeth: “Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t”. (2.2)
Macduff: “"Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit, and look on death itself!”
(2.3) Macbeth: “Duncan is in his grave after life’s fitful fever he sleep well” (3.2)
Lady Macbeth: ”You lack the season of all natures, sleep” (3.4)
Doctor: “A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the
effects of watching!” (5.1)

Macbeth - Quotes
Ms Ní Chonfhaola
Imagery - Children

Macbeth: “pity, like a naked new-born babe, striding the blast” (1.7)
Lady Macbeth: “I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from
its boneless gums, and dashed the brains out” (1.7)
Witches: (making a potion) “finger of birth-strangled babe, ditch-delivered by a drab” (4.1)
Lady Macduff: “To leave his wife, to leave his babes, his mansion and his titles in a place
from whence himself does fly?” (4.2)

Imagery - Clothing
 Macbeth: The Thane of Cawdor lives; why do you dress me in borrow'd robes?” (1.3) Banquo:
“New honours come upon him, like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould but with
the aid of use.” (1.3)
Macbeth: "He hath honour'd me of late; and I have bought golden opinions from all sorts
of people, which would be worn now in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon” (1.7)
Banquo: "naked frailties hid, that suffer in exposure” (2.3)
Macduff: "Well, may you see things well done there: adieu! Lest our old robes sit easier than
our new!” (2.4)
Angus: "Those he commands move only in command, nothing in love: now does he feel his
title hang loose about him, like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief” (5.2)

Imagery - Blood

Lady Macbeth: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” (5.1)

Macduff: “Bleed, bleed, poor country.” (4.3)
Macbeth: “Thou canst not say I did it; never shake thy gory locks at me!”
(3.4) Macbeth: His gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature.” (2.3)

Kingship

Macbeth: “Your highness’ part is to receive our duties, and our duties are to your throne and
state, children and servants which do but what they should by doing everything safe toward
your love and honour” (1.4)
Macduff: “Most sacrilegious murder hath broke open the lord’s anointed temple and stole
thence the life o’th’building” (2.3)
Banquo: “Let your highness command upon me, to the which my duties are with a
most indissoluble tie forever knit” (3.1)

Masculinity

Lady Macbeth: "What beast was't, then, that made you break this enterprise to me? When
you durst do it, then you were a man" (1.7)
First Murderer: “We are men my liege” (3.1)
Macbeth: "Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; / As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels,
spaniels, curs, / Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept / All by the name of dogs”
(3.1) Macbeth: “What man dare, I dare” (3.4)
Lady Macbeth: "flaws and starts, impostors to true fear, would well become a woman's story at
a winter's fire, authorised by her grandam. Shame itself!” (3.4)
Malcolm: “Dispute it like a man,” (4.3)
Macduff: “I shall do so. But I must also feel it as a man” (4.3)

Macbeth - Quotes
Ms Ní Chonfhaola
Scotland

Ross: It cannot be called our mother, but our grave (4.3)

Macduff: Bleed, bleed poor country (4.3)

Guilt

Macbeth: “Or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from
the head.” (2.1)
Macbeth: “Is this a dagger which I see before me” (2.1)
Macbeth: “I have thee not, and yet I see thee still” (2.1)
Macbeth: “I am afraid to think what I have done” (2.2)
Macbeth: “To know my deed, ‘twere best not know my self.” (2.2)
Macbeth: “These deeds must not be thought after these ways; so it will make us mad.” (2.2)
Macbeth: “But wherefore could I not pronounce ‘Amen?’ I had most need of blessing and
‘Amen’ stuck in my throat.” (2.2)

Deception

Duncan: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” (1.4)
Lady Macbeth: “Look like th’innocent flower but be the serpent under’t.” (1.5) Macbeth:
“Away, and mock the time with fairest show, false face must hide what false heart doth know”
(1.7)
Macbeth to Banquo: “I think not of them” (2.1)
Banquo: “Thou played’st most foully for ’t” (3.1)