SCIENCE!
I'm supposed to be doing my homework, but I'd rather not (c'mon, you guys, I have a Chinese midterm, give me a break :P), so instead, I'm going to write about evolution. One of my classes this year is an upper-division biology class, Experimental Ecology & Evolution (E3, for short, and I love it more than any class ever), which is giving me uppity ( Read more... )
Well, yes, because people can say things that are dead wrong. But let's take an actual Shakespeare quote - Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, for instance. Someone who has never had occasion to contemplate suicide, nor known anyone driven to that level of despair, will not understand it. But to everyone else, it resonates, because it accords with their own observations about life.
So, Shakespeare's statements are not evidence for their own truth (and really, how could they be?); rather, the truth of his statements is a conclusion that the reader draws, using his/her observations as the evidence. Just because a statement isn't considered evidence for the purposes of a particular type of discussion, it doesn't follow that it is meaningless.
At any rate, if the original idea does not accord with Rachel's observations, I don't quite understand how a quote that essentially restates what you're trying to argue ought to be taken as proof - however brilliantly it may phrase the idea.
(If Shakespeare expressed an idea similar to what you were originally saying [which is entirely possible], I cannot think of it off the top of my head. However, you might have been thinking of Ecclesiastes 1:9, "There is nothing new under the sun." And given that Ecclesiastes is basically Solomon drowning in his own angst, if I were you, I would hesitate to put forth any line from its early chapters as a truth about human existence, or evidence thereof.)
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