Some of my favorite quotes from William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”


Gustave Moreau (1826-1898). Arion, 1891. Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais.

“Good wombs have borne bad sons.” Miranda 1.2.119

“My library was dukedom large enough.” Prospero 1.2.109–10

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” Ariel 1.2.214

“Not a hair perished. / On their sustaining garments not a blemish, / But fresher than before.”  Ariel 1.2.218–20

“Therefore wast thou / Deservedly confined into this rock, / Who hadst deserved more than a prison.”  Miranda 1.2.361–63

“You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” Caliban 1.2.364–66

“Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes: / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” Ariel 1.2.397–402

“Temperance was a delicate wench” Antonio 2.1.46

“The beauty of his daughter; he himself / Calls her a nonpareil.” Caliban 3.2.99–100

“If I have too austerely punished you, / Your compensation makes amends, for I / Have given you here a third of mine own life—Or that for which I live—” Prospero 4.1.1–4

Shakespeare, William.The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011.

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