Passages from The Merchant of Venice

The moment an insult becomes a case for revenge.

He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? 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, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled 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, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

Mercy is the one thing power cannot demand.

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,It droppeth as the gentle rain from heavenUpon the place beneath: it is twice blest;It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomesThe throned monarch better than his crown;His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,The attribute to awe and majesty,Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;But mercy is above this sceptred sway;It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,It is an attribute to God himself;

A goodbye written to be repeated to someone else.

But little: I am arm’d and well prepared.Give me your hand, Bassanio: fare you well!Grieve not that I am fallen to this for you;For herein Fortune shows herself more kindThan is her custom: it is still her useTo let the wretched man outlive his wealth,To view with hollow eye and wrinkled browAn age of poverty; from which lingering penanceOf such misery doth she cut me off.Commend me to your honourable wife:Tell her the process of Antonio’s end;Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death;And, when the tale is told, bid her be judgeWhether Bassanio had not once a love.

The sky is music we are too heavy to hear.

Sweet soul, let’s in, and there expect their coming.And yet no matter: why should we go in?My friend Stephano, signify, I pray you,Within the house, your mistress is at hand;And bring your music forth into the air. Exit Stephano.How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!Here will we sit and let the sounds of musicCreep in our ears: soft stillness and the nightBecome the touches of sweet harmony.Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heavenIs thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’stBut in his motion like an angel sings,Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

The law the brain writes, and the one the blood keeps ignoring.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree: such a hare is madness the youth, to skip o’er the meshes of good counsel the cripple. But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband. O me, the word “choose!” I may neither choose whom I would nor refuse whom I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father. Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot choose one nor refuse none?

How a smooth voice makes a rotten case sound lawful.

So may the outward shows be least themselves:The world is still deceived with ornament.In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,Obscures the show of evil? In religion,What damned error, but some sober browWill bless it and approve it with a text,Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?

Every fortune is a rumour about ships that have not come in.

Oh, no, no, no, no: my meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient. Yet his means are in supposition: he hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies; I understand moreover, upon the Rialto, he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he hath, squandered abroad. But ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, water-thieves and land-thieves, I mean pirates, and then there is the peril of waters, winds and rocks. The man is, notwithstanding, sufficient. Three thousand ducats; I think I may take his bond.

Attraction has a birthplace, and it is not the heart.

Tell me where is fancy bred,Or in the heart, or in the head?How begot, how nourished?Reply, reply.It is engender’d in the eyes,With gazing fed; and fancy diesIn the cradle where it lies.Let us all ring fancy’s knellI’ll begin it,—Ding, dong, bell.

Everyone knows a man who talks for an hour and says nothing.

Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.