Valentine weekend is a good occasion to revisit the Shakespeare’s best quotes. For me to find a bunch that would tackle love in various forms would be natural as The Bard of Avon is known to have written some of the best love stories ever staged.

I would be classifying the quotes I have gathered so far including the literary gems from which they are sourced.

The Early Stages 

Love is too young to know what conscience is.
– from Sonnet 151

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.
– from Romeo and Juliet

The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact.
– from A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
– from Twelfth Night

Handling the Relationship

The course of true love never did run smooth.
– from A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
– from All’s Well That Ends Well

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.
– from Julius Caesar

But it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in the most humorous sadness.
– from As You Like It

The Folly of Love

Men are April when they woo, December when they wed…
– from As You Like It

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.
– from Much Ado About Nothing

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who ne’er loved them
– from Coriolanus

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch
Which hurts and is desired.
– from Antony and Cleopatra

My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me,
That I must love a loathed enemy.
– from Romeo and Juliet

Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish’d and cured is that the lunacy is so
ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”
– from As You Like It

Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.
– from Hamlet

Indeed there is a method to the madness called love – the same emotion that pushed Hamlet back into his madness. The same kind of madness I am about to assume once I get to play the title role this month.

Let this serve as an invitation to one and all. Catch Hamlet at DITO Bahay ng Sining. Click the poster to enlarge and see the dates. Ticket prices at Php350. For further updates, please like my Facebook page, Kuya Manzano Fan Club, and follow me on Twitter @kuyamanzano. Gracias!