Quotes about shakespeare
William Shakespeare -
Some there be that shadow kiss Such have but a shadow's bliss.
Eugène Ionesco -
All men die in solitude all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
They are but beggars that can count their worth But my true love is grown to such excess I cannot sum up half of my wealth.
Mark Forsyth - The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
So Shakespeare stole but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He's like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.
William Shakespeare -
It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods To tell them that this world did equal theirs Till they had stolen our jewel.
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
Wisely and slow they stumble that run fast.
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?Beautiful tyrant, feind angelical, dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of devinest show, just opposite to what thou justly seemest - A dammed saint, an honourable villain!
William Shakespeare - Hamlet
Sweets to the sweet.
William Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing
I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.
William Shakespeare - Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, And too often is his gold complexion dimm'd: And every fair from fair sometimes declines, By chance or natures changing course untrimm'd; By thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eter
William Shakespeare - Great Sonnets
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand'ring barque, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge o
William Shakespeare - Twelfth Night
Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.
Neil Gaiman -
I know that David Tennant's Hamlet isn't till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush..."To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that
W.B. Yeats - Rosa Alchemica
The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his
William Shakespeare - The Merchant of Venice
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.
Herbert Spencer - First Principles
We too often forget that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil,' but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.
Chelsie Shakespeare - The Pull
The longer I lived, the longer it would be until I saw him alive again, until I could taste his new lips and run my fingers through his new hair. We could be young and beautiful again . . .
William Shakespeare - Macbeth
I drink to the general joy o’ the whole table." Macbeth
L.M. Montgomery - Emily Climbs
Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story. . . . Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91)
Reduced Shakespeare Company - The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr
What's in a name, anyway? That which we call a nose by any other name would still smell.
P.G. Wodehouse - Jeeves in the Morning
It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.
Dave Barry -
I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that 'the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.' I could not have phrased it better myself.
Oscar Wilde - Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories
Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.‘Quite so…
Roger Zelazny - Sign of the Unicorn
To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.
William Shakespeare - Measure for Measure
Life... is a paradise to what we fear of death.
Gary D. Schmidt - The Wednesday Wars
You can't just skip the boring parts.""Of course I can skip the boring parts.""How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?""I can tell.""Then you can't say you've read the whole play.""I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.""Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.
Ray Bradbury - Zen in the Art of Writing
Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
Walter Kaufmann -
One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. Experiences and aspirations of which intimations may be found in Plato, Nietzsche, and Spinoza have found their most evocative expression in some sacred books. Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that
Oscar Wilde -
I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
Brandi L. Bates -
You and those shot-glass eyes, deep swirling pools of 80-proof firewater, with the depth and profundity of Saturn’s spinning pulsars…
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
I take thee at thy word:Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
Anthony M. Esolen -
[Today's high schoolers are required to read] a couple of Shakespeare plays...the couple of Shakespeare plays function as an inoculation – that is, you get exposed to 'half-dead Shakespeare virus', and it keeps you from ever loving Shakespeare again, your whole life long. It would be much better if they didn't do that at all!Because [the students] have no linguistic preparation for it, and no cultural or historical preparation for it. They've not been reading English poetry, so the language stri
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
Educated men are so impressive!
Gayle Forman - Just One Day
To be or not to be: that is the question. That's from Hamlet's - maybe Shakespeare's - most famous soliloquy. I had to memorize the whole speech for sophomore English, and I can still remember every word. I didn't give it much thought back then. I just wanted to get all the words right and collect my A.
Stacey Jay - Juliet Immortal
Shakespeare’s enduring tragedy did its part to further the goals of the Mercenaries—glamorizing death, making dying for love seem the most noble act of all, though nothing could be further from the truth. Taking an innocent life—in a misguided attempt to prove love or for any other reason—is a useless waste.
Chelsie Shakespeare -
He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.
William Shakespeare - All's Well That Ends Well
Love is holy.
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
La vida es mi tortura y la muerte será mi descanso.
Chelsie Shakespeare - The Pull
When we can't understand the science behind something in this world, we make up mythological entities that we can relate to. We personify the forces of nature that mystify us, using our boundless imaginations to comfort us and make us feel like we have some control over these things that are much bigger than we are.
William Shakespeare - Coriolanus
These are the ushers of Martius: before himHe carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears.Death, that dark spirit, in's nervy arm doth lie,Which being advanc'd, declines, and then men die.
Rebecca Serle - When You Were Mine
They died together; they'll always be remembered together. It's decided, once and for all. He was hers.
Chelsie Shakespeare - The Pull
I don't think that science and the paranormal have to be at war; in fact, it's crucial that they work together. It seems naïve to believe that the world is exactly as it seems.
William Shakespeare - King Lear
През дрипите прозира всеки грях,а мантии и шуби скриват всичко!
William Shakespeare -
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings.
William Shakespeare -
For thy sweet love remembr'd such wealth bringsThat then, I scorn to change my state with kings.
Rebecca Serle - When You Were Mine
How do you mourn something that never really belonged to you?
Chelsie Shakespeare - The Pull
He would reach for me in the middle of the night, nearly every single night, wrapping one of those solid arms around my waist and pulling me in close. So. Close.
William Shakespeare - Love's Labour's Lost
Come on then, I will swear to study soTo know the thing I am forbid to know- Berowne
Alison Larkin - The English American
Who are these people sharing the street with me? What is going on in their worlds, inside their heads? Are they in love? If so, is it the kind that Mum and Dad have? Based on having things in common, like raspberry picking and a love of dogs, and Shakespeare, and long country walks? Or is it the knock-you-out, eat-you-up, set-you-on-fire kind of love that I have longed for-and avoided-all my life?
William Shakespeare - Coriolanus
Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men.
William Shakespeare - The Two Noble Kinsmen
This hand shall never more come near thee with such friendship
William Shakespeare - As You Like It
...what care I for words? Yet words do wellWhen he that speaks them pleases those that hear.
William Shakespeare -
Mother, you have my father much offended.
William Shakespeare - Henry V
[Thine] face is not worth sunburning.
William Shakespeare - Part 2
Thou art a very ragged Wart.
Ellen Raskin - The Westing Game
I remember the will said, 'May God thy gold refine.' That must be from the Bible.""Shakespeare," Turtle said. All quotations were either from the Bible or Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare - Henry IV: Part 1
[Thou] mad mustachio purple-hued maltworms!
Rhiannon McGavin -
I'm never growing up, I'll just sit in the corner of time and sip my juice box petulantly and judge your terrible Hamlet adaptations.
Alfred North Whitehead - An Introduction to Mathematics
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
William Shakespeare - Shakespeare's Sonnets
When I do count the clock that tells the time,And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;When I behold the violet past prime,And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;When lofty trees I see barren of leavesWhich erst from heat did canopy the herd,And summer's green all girded up in sheavesBorne on the bier with white and bristly beard,Then of thy beauty do I question make,That thou among the wastes of time must go,Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsakeAnd die as fast as they see oth
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room
What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?
William Shakespeare - The Merchant of Venice
By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, but music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night and his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
William Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing
Tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than once.
William Shakespeare - The Taming of the Shrew
Such a mad marriage never was before.
Jillian Keenan - but More with Love
If I could mimic the dynamic of any Shakespearean marriage, I’d choose to mimic the Macbeths—before the murder, ruthless ambition, and torturous descents into madness and death, that is.
William Shakespeare - The Taming of the Shrew
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,And for thy maintenance; commits his bodyTo painful labor, both by sea and land;To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe;And craves no other tribute at thy handsBut love, fair looks, and true obedience-Too little payment for so great a debt.Such duty as the subject owes the prince,Even such a woman oweth to her husband;And when she is froward, peevis
Nina LaCour - Hold Still
He is Romeo, and he is heartbroken. Every word is wistful. When he says, 'O, teach me how I should forget to think!' I, for the first time, see what the big deal is about Shakespeare.
Bert McCoy -
To see the positive or not to see the positive, this is the question.
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own
... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female sides of his mind] equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in t
Kathy Bryson - Restless Spirits
My inner bitch could handle this peon without even breaking a sweat.
Richard Ronald Allan - Exit Eleonora
She captured the spot of my world’s centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.
Richard Ronald Allan -
How would it alter Juliet’s love perception to learn the sea is but a rounded jug of water? Would her sensuous analogy turned simple simile unveil to her the limits of herself? Or would she forget the ocean, that deplorable casket, and turn on the true bottomless tumbler, the only running tap: the sky? It may have lost the title ‘heavens’ when its gods were dethroned, but its infinity reigns. So long as you walk, it reigns. So long as I talk and you listen, there’s a voice and ears to keep it ac
William Shakespeare - Julius Caesar
The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.
Isaac Marion -
To be or not to be, that is the question: to go on living, fighting against this sea of troubles, or to die and end everything? Why be afraid of death? To die is to sleep, no more. Perhaps to dream? Yes, that's the problem: in that sleep of death, what dreams will come?
Washington Irving - Irving's Sketch Book
He is indeed the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.
T.S. Eliot -
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness,
William Shakespeare - The Taming of the Shrew
Whate'er I read to her. I'll plead for youAs for my patron, stand you so assured,As firmly as yourself were in still place - Yea, and perhaps with more successful wordsThan you, unless you were a scholar, sir.O this learning, what a thing it is!
Pawan Mishra - Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
You aren’t in the ivy halls of your miserable literature pursuit now. Without wasting more time, will thou cometh to the pointeth? Dost thou wanteth us to stayeth or leaveth?
William Shakespeare - King Lear
That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t' unloose; smooth every passionThat in the natures of their lords rebel,Being oil to the fire, snow to the colder moods,Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaksWith every gale and vary of their mastersKnowing naught, like dogs, but following.
John Green - The Fault in Our Stars
Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
Andrea Mays - The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio
This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Uncle's Dream
Can you blame me, my dear, for looking on this attachment as a romantic folly inspired by that cursed Shakespeare who will poke his nose where he is not wanted?
Krista McGee - Starring Me
Do not speak unflatteringly of Jane," Flora said, walking beside Chad. "She is the greatest writer to have ever lived." "I thought that was Shakespeare." "William was, or course, quite good," Flora said. "But no one can compare to Jane Austen.
George Orwell - In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950
In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
John C. Wright - Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
Imagine the same scene in HAMLET if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudius. We are all told Claudius will die by drinking the cup. Then Claudius dies choking on a chicken bone at lunch. Then the Queen dies when Horatio shows her the magical Mirror of Death. This mirror appears in no previous scene, nor is it explained why it exists. Then Ophelia summons up the Ghost from Act One and kills it, while she makes a speech denouncing the evi
J.R.R. Tolkien -
Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life ...
Elizabeth Wein - Code Name Verity
It was wonderful flirting with him, all the razor-edged literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test, too.
Harold Bloom -
There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.
Thomas Henry Huxley -
In fact a favourite problem of [John Tyndall] is—Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.
Bill Bryson - Shakespeare: The World as Stage
And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'back
William Shakespeare - Hamlet
Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
D.H. Lawrence -
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
Kenji Yoshino - A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice
To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.
William Shakespeare -
O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace.
William Shakespeare - Othello
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,Is the immediate jewel of their souls:Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;But he that filches from me my good nameRobs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed.
Adam Phillips Going Sane -
Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare
Terry Eagleton - How to Read Literature
Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all.