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Act 2, Scene 1

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
This handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?
I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There’s no such thing.
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes.

In this soliloquy from Act 2, Scene 1, Macbeth hallucinates that a bloody knife is floating in the air right before he murders Duncan. Macbeth’s mental state changes as the play progresses, and this is a key moment in that trajectory. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Character: Macbeth (the third quote) and in Quotes by Symbols: Blood (the second quote).

 

I go, and it is done. The bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

These words are spoken by Macbeth at the end of Act 2, Scene 1, as he ends his long soliloquy in which he has hallucinated seeing a floating knife as he contemplates murdering Duncan. After he acknowledges hearing a bell ring—which Lady Macbeth arranged as a signal to proceed with the murder—he closes the scene with a rhyming couplet, saying he hopes that Duncan doesn’t hear the bell since it is, in fact, his death knell.

 

Act 2, Scene 2

I laid their daggers ready;
He could not miss ‘em. Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done’t.

This quote from Act 2, Scene 2, from Lady Macbeth describes how she did not kill Duncan and her stated reasons for not doing so. Her words call into question the bloodthirsty image she projected earlier in the play. This passage is further explained in Quotes by Character: Lady Macbeth (the fifth quote).

 

Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

In this passage, Macbeth has just carried out the plan to murder King Duncan, but he is haunted by a voice he heard afterward, telling Macbeth he had murdered “innocent sleep” itself. Macbeth describes the virtues of sleep, the ways it sustains and heals people. Because he took advantage of a sleeping Duncan at his most vulnerable, Macbeth’s guilty conscience holds him responsible for the loss of all the good things that sleep provides. Beyond killing just one man, Macbeth has upset the natural order and will himself no longer be able to rest.

 

Whence is that knocking?—
How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine
Making the green one red.

This crucially important passage spoken by Macbeth in Act 2, Scene 2, comes as he talks to Lady Macbeth immediately after he has killed Duncan. As we will see as the play progresses, his words here foreshadow much of what is to come in the remainder of Macbeth. The full passage is explained in greater depth in Famous Quotes Explained as well as in Quotes by Character: Macbeth (the fourth quote), while the significance of the ending of the passage (“Neptune’s ocean…”) is discussed further in Quotes by Theme: The Relentlessness of Guilt (the first quote) and in Quotes by Symbol: Blood (the third quote).

 

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