Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveQuote

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act 1, Scene 4

Literature

The story behind the card

Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure around 1603–04, and it was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. In Vienna, the strict deputy ruler Angelo has sentenced a young man, Claudio, to death for making his fiancée, Juliet, pregnant before their wedding. Claudio's friend Lucio hurries to a convent to find Claudio's sister Isabella, a novice nun, and urge her to plead with Angelo. When Isabella says she doubts she has any power to help, Lucio answers with these lines. It is telling that such sound advice comes from Lucio, a flippant gossip. Isabella goes, and her pleading drives the rest of the play. The title echoes a line in the Gospel of Matthew: the measure you use on others will be used on you.

Türkçe oku
Kuşkularımız haindir; bizi denemekten korkutur ve çoğu zaman kazanabileceğimiz iyi şeyleri kaybettirir.
William Shakespeare, Kısasa Kısas, 1. perde, 4. sahne

Shakespeare Kısasa Kısas'ı 1603–04 dolaylarında yazdı; oyun ilk kez 1623'te İlk Folyo'da basıldı. Viyana'yı dükün yokluğunda yöneten katı vekil Angelo, genç Claudio'yu nişanlısı Juliet'i düğünden önce hamile bıraktığı için ölüme mahkûm etmiştir. Claudio'nun arkadaşı Lucio, onun rahibe adayı olan kız kardeşi Isabella'yı bulmak için manastıra koşar ve onu Angelo'ya gidip yalvarmaya ikna etmeye çalışır. Isabella elinden bir şey gelebileceğinden kuşkulu olduğunu söyleyince Lucio bu sözlerle karşılık verir. Bu yerinde öğüdün, hafifliği ve dedikoduculuğuyla bilinen Lucio'nun ağzından çıkması dikkat çekicidir. Isabella gider ve onun yakarışı oyunun geri kalanını yönlendirir. Oyunun adı Matta İncili'ndeki bir sözden gelir: İnsan başkalarını hangi ölçüyle ölçerse, kendisi de o ölçüyle ölçülür.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: William Shakespeare
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveLiterature

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.

'If—' is written as a father's advice to his son: a long chain of conditions that ends, 'you'll be a Man, my son!' Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), the author of The Jungle Book, published it in 1910 in Rewards and Fairies and said it was inspired by Leander Starr Jameson, leader of a failed raid in southern Africa in 1895–96. These two lines are written on the wall of the players' entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon, and in a BBC poll in the 1990s the poem was voted Britain's favourite.

Rudyard Kipling, "If—" (1910)Read card
DriveLiterature

I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.

These are the last two lines of 'Invictus'. William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), an English poet and editor, lost his left leg below the knee to tuberculosis as a young man. From 1873 he was treated at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh by the surgeon Joseph Lister, who saved his other leg, and he wrote the poem there in 1875. It was published without a title in 1888; the Latin title, meaning 'unconquered', was added by an anthology editor in 1900. Nelson Mandela recited it to fellow prisoners on Robben Island.

W.E. Henley, "Invictus" (1875)Read card
DriveLiterature

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), the Philadelphia printer, scientist and statesman, published Poor Richard's Almanack every year from 1732 to 1758 under the pen name Richard Saunders. Among its calendars and weather forecasts were short sayings, many of them older proverbs he sharpened. In the 1734 edition this one is a rhyming couplet: 'Take this remark from Richard poor and lame, / Whate'er's begun in anger ends in shame.' In 1753 he added that anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1734)Read card
DriveLiterature

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

No one has found this line in Franklin's writings. It was being printed as his by 1909, more than a century after his death, usually after another unverified line about a man who 'empties his purse into his head'. In 1989 the Library of Congress's dictionary of quotations, Respectfully Quoted, listed it as unverified. It suits him, though: Franklin left school at ten, taught himself by reading, and in 1731 helped found the Library Company of Philadelphia so that its members could share books.

Benjamin Franklin (attributed, 18th century)Read card
DriveLiterature

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.

This maxim opens Chapter 12 of Mark Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). Each chapter begins with a saying from ‘Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar’, the joke almanac kept by David Wilson, a clever lawyer whom his Missouri town dismisses as a fool, or ‘pudd'nhead’. The entry goes on to say that calling a creature brave only makes sense if it is partly a coward: otherwise the flea, which attacks people asleep or awake whatever their size, would be the bravest animal alive. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens (1835–1910).

Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)Read card
Next card in the archiveThe readiness is all.Read next →