Macbeth: Famous Quotes

The Witches chant this paradox in the opening scene, and it sets the moral weather of the whole play: a world where good and evil have traded places and nothing can be read at face value. What looks fair will prove foul, and what is foul will wear a fair face.

G. Wilson Knight, in his 1930 study The Wheel of Fire, read the play as a sustained vision of evil unsettling the natural order — and this couplet is its keynote. The inversion it announces governs everything that follows: Duncan trusting his murderer, Macbeth's castle smiling over a planned killing, a hero hollowed into a tyrant.

The three witches greet Macbeth with titles that climb from the actual to the impossible: Glamis, which he holds; Cawdor, which he is about to be given; and king, which he is not. The middle prophecy comes true within minutes, and that single hit is enough to make him believe the third.

The greeting is the hinge on which the tragedy turns. The witches predict but never instruct; they name a future and leave Macbeth to decide what to do about it. Everything afterwards — the murders, the tyranny, the ruin — flows from the choices he makes to force a prophecy that might have arrived on its own.

Hearing that Duncan has named his son Malcolm heir, Macbeth feels the throne slipping out of reach and, for the first time, lets the murderous thought take shape. He asks the stars to go dark so that even the light cannot witness what he intends.

The instinct here is concealment, not yet action — he wants his “black and deep desires” hidden even from himself. It is the first of the play's many images of darkness invoked to cover crime, and it marks the moment ambition stops being a feeling and starts becoming a plan.

Reading her husband's letter, Lady Macbeth sizes him up with startling clarity: he wants the crown but is “too full o' the milk of human kindness” to seize it by the shortest route. Kindness, to her, is not a virtue but an obstacle.

The image is pointedly maternal — milk, nurture, the feminine — and she names it precisely so she can set herself against it. Her whole project in the next scenes is to drain that milk from them both: to make herself, and then him, hard enough to kill a sleeping guest.

Coaching her husband to greet Duncan, Lady Macbeth compresses the play's whole strategy into one image: be the welcoming flower the eye expects, and hide the serpent beneath. It is the practical lesson of “fair is foul” turned into stagecraft.

The line also exposes the marriage's division of labour at this point: she supplies the nerve and the playbook, he supplies the hand. The flower-and-serpent picture will haunt the rest of the play, as every smile at Macbeth's court has to be read for the blade behind it.

Alone before the murder, Macbeth tries to reason his way to the deed and instead reasons his way out of it. If only the killing could be over the instant it was done, he says — but he knows it cannot, because consequences follow, in this world if not the next.

What stops him here is not conscience exactly but calculation: Duncan is his king, his kinsman, and his guest, and the murder would teach others to murder him in turn. The soliloquy shows a mind clear-sighted enough to see every reason against the crime — and weak enough, once his wife arrives, to do it anyway.

By the end of the same soliloquy Macbeth has run out of justifications and admits the truth: he has no real motive at all, “only vaulting ambition.” The famous image is of a rider who leaps so hard for the saddle that he flies clean over the horse and lands on the far side.

It is a remarkably honest piece of self-knowledge. Macbeth names his own flaw and even predicts his own fall in the same breath — ambition that overreaches and topples. That he proceeds regardless is the heart of his tragedy: he sees exactly what he is doing, and does it.

When Macbeth wavers, his wife steadies him with the language of the battlefield he comes from: wind the courage tight, like a crossbow drawn to its catch, and it will hold. The metaphor turns nerve into a mechanism you can lock into place.

It is Lady Macbeth at her most commanding — supplying the resolve her husband lacks. The bitter irony arrives later: the courage she screws so tight in him cannot be unscrewed, and the conscience she dismisses tonight will destroy her own mind by Act 5.

Returning from Duncan's chamber with bloody hands, Macbeth is unstrung by a voice he thinks he heard crying that he has murdered sleep itself — the “innocent sleep” that heals and restores. He has killed not just a king but his own capacity for rest.

Thomas De Quincey, in his 1823 essay On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, wrote about how this scene suspends ordinary life and then jolts it back; the murder cuts the Macbeths off from the normal human world, and sleep is the first thing they lose. From here neither of them will sleep soundly again.

Staring at his hands, Macbeth asks whether all the water in the ocean could wash them clean, and answers himself: no — the blood would sooner turn the green seas red. The guilt is not a stain to be rinsed but a thing that spreads outward and dyes the world.

The grandeur of the image measures the size of what he has done. Lady Macbeth will counter, moments later, that “a little water” is enough; the gap between his ocean and her handful is the gap between two people who have not yet understood how differently this crime will work on each of them.

Lady Macbeth's reply to her husband's horror is brisk and practical: wash, and the deed washes off with the blood. At this stage she genuinely believes guilt is a surface problem, removable with a basin of water.

The line is set like a trap for Act 5. The same woman who dismisses blood as a stain to be sponged away will end the play scrubbing at a spot no one else can see, undone by the conscience she here pretends does not exist. Few lines in Shakespeare are answered so cruelly by their own speaker.

Crowned at last, Macbeth discovers that the throne is not the end of fear but the start of it. To be king is nothing, he reasons, unless he is safely king — and Banquo, whose descendants the witches promised would reign, makes him anything but safe.

The speech marks his slide from murderer to tyrant. Having killed to gain the crown, he must now kill to keep it, and the logic has no floor: each new threat demands another death. The man who once needed his wife's goading now plots Banquo's murder alone.

Macbeth confides to his wife that his mind is “full of scorpions” — a single image that captures the stinging, self-renewing torment of his guilt and dread. The crown is won, but his thoughts have become a nest of venom.

The line also marks a shift in the marriage. Where once they plotted together, Macbeth now keeps his worst designs from her; he hints at “a deed of dreadful note” but will not name Banquo's murder. The partnership that began the play is quietly coming apart under the weight of what they have done.

Macbeth's metaphor for his unfinished business is a wounded snake: they have slashed it but not killed it, and it will heal and threaten them again. He means Banquo and Fleance — the danger he has injured but not removed.

It is the reasoning of a man who has learned that one murder is never enough. The image admits, without his quite meaning it to, that violence does not settle anything; the snake simply re-forms. Each killing leaves a survivor, a witness, or an heir, and so demands the next.

Shaken by Banquo's ghost at the feast, Macbeth states the grim law he now lives under: blood will have blood. Murder calls out for murder, and the dead do not stay quietly buried.

Spoken by the man who began the cycle, the line is both a confession and a prophecy. He understands that he has set something in motion that will come back for him — that the violence he has used will be used against him in turn. It is the play's theory of justice in four words.

Macbeth measures how far he has gone with one of his bleakest images: he is wading in a river of blood, so far from the bank that turning back would be as wearisome as pressing on. Continuing has become easier than repenting.

This is the tyrant's logic laid bare. He no longer pretends the killing is justified; he simply observes that he is committed, and lets momentum decide. The line explains the slaughter of the rest of the play — Macduff's family included — as the choice of a man who has decided it is too late to stop.

Around the cauldron, the Witches chant the play's most famous spell as they brew their charm of grotesque ingredients. The hypnotic, drumming rhythm — unlike the blank verse of the human characters — marks their speech as something outside the natural order.

The scene is the hinge of Macbeth's downfall. He comes to the Witches now demanding answers, and the apparitions they raise feed him the false confidence that will destroy him. The chant's eerie music is the sound of a man walking willingly into a trap baited with prophecy.

A Witch feels Macbeth approaching before she sees him: a prickling in the thumbs warns her that something wicked is on its way. The line is now a byword for the sense of approaching dread.

What chills is who the “wicked” thing is. By Act 4 it is Macbeth himself whose arrival the Witches register as evil — the celebrated soldier of Act 1 has become the menace that even witches can feel coming. His moral journey is measured in that one word.

Sleepwalking and watched in secret by a doctor, Lady Macbeth relives the murders, scrubbing at a bloodstain only she can see. The brisk, commanding woman of the early acts has been reduced to a broken voice trying to wash her hands clean.

The scene is the exact reversal of “a little water clears us of this deed.” The guilt she once dismissed as a surface stain has gone all the way in, surfacing only when her waking control is gone. Conscience, the play insists, cannot be screwed down forever; it returns in the dark.

Still scrubbing in her sleep, Lady Macbeth realises that no washing will help: the smell of blood clings to her hand, and all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten it. The crime has soaked past the skin into the self.

Shakespeare gives her this broken half-line in prose, not verse — the ordered metre of her ambition has collapsed into the fragments of a ruined mind. It is the play's most intimate picture of guilt: not punishment from outside, but a conscience that has quietly destroyed its owner from within.

Cornered, his charms exposed as lies, Macbeth still refuses to surrender or to take his own life. He throws up his shield and invites Macduff to fight, daring damnation on whoever first calls for the fighting to stop.

There is a grim, soldierly courage here that recalls the hero of Act 1. Stripped of prophecy and hope, Macbeth falls back on the one thing that was always real — his nerve in battle. It is too late to make him sympathetic, but it makes his end the death of a warrior rather than a coward.

At the last, Macbeth clings to the Witches' promise that “none of woman born” can harm him — until Macduff reveals he was not born in the ordinary way but “from his mother's womb untimely ripped,” delivered by what we would now call caesarean section.

It is the moment the prophecies spring their trap. Like the assurance that he is safe until Birnam Wood marches, this one was true to the letter and fatal in the event. Macbeth sees, too late, that the powers he trusted were playing on words all along, and that their comfort was the bait of a hook.