Shakespeare Quotes

To die, is to be banish'd from myself; And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her, Is self from self: a deadly banishment! What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by? Unless it be to think that she is by, And feed upon the shadow of perfection.Except I be by Silvia in the night, There is no music in the nightingale; Unless I look on Silvia in the day, There is no day for me to look upon; She is my essence, and I leave to be, If I be not by her fair influence Foster'd, illumin'd, cherish'd, kept alive.

~ William Shakespeare

i heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.

~ Bill Hirst

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Everybody needs a career manager.- Lady Macbeth

~ Robert Lynn Asprin

What do you do when the alienating silence deafens your 'bootless cries'?

~ Solange Nicole

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

~ Peter Porter

She is drowned already, sir, with salt water, though I seem to drown her remembrance again with more.

~ William Shakespeare

We now doubt Aristotle, understand Shakespeare only with footnotes.

~ Ada Palmer

A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.

~ Harold Bloom

About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.

~ T.s. Eliot

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten’?” He laughed again. “Racine has his moments, sure, but you can’t beat Shakespeare for the really grisly stuff.

~ Adam Roberts

Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

~ William Shakespeare

It’s the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.

~ Amanda Craig

Pleasure and revenge have ears more deaf than adders to the voice of any true decision.

~ William Shakespeare

Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.

~ George Orwell

What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.Richard loves Richard; that is, I and I.

~ William Shakespeare

Celebrate the Ides of March but remember your own warnings less as Caesar learned, you can get killed in many ways

~ Phillip Gary Smith

As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Johnson, or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead, you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that you will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare's words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors' deliveries and notice the audience's reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery; Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his Hamlet. But what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse, they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words. If they pause to emphasize the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.

~ Ian Mortimer

[Act 5, Scene 4, ROSALIND] If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

~ William Shakespeare

If I could write the beauty of your eyesAnd in fresh numbers number all your graces,The age to come would say 'this poet lies! Such heaven never touched earthly faces

~ William Shakespeare

Must I observe you? Must I stand & crouchUnder your testy humour? By the gods, You shall digest the venom ofyour spleen,Though it do split you, for, from thisday forth, I'll use you for my mirth, yea,for my laughter, when you are waspish.

~ William Shakespeare

Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets the its indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.

~ Emily St. John Mandel

[Shakespeare} the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping

~ Virginia Woolf

No, take more! What may be sworn by, both divine and human, Seal what I end withal! This double worship, Where [one] part does disdain with cause, the other Insult without all reason; where gentry, title, wisdom, Cannot conclude but by the yea and no Of general ignorance— it must omit Real necessities, and give way the while To unstable slightness. Purpose so barr’d, it follows Nothing is done to purpose. Therefore beseech you— You that will be less fearful than discreet; That love the fundamental part of state More than you doubt the change on’t; that prefer A noble life before a long, and wish To jump a body with a dangerous physic That’s sure of death without it— at once pluck out The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick The sweet which is their poison. Your dishonor Mangles true judgment, and bereaves the state Of that integrity which should become’t; Not having the power to do the good it would, For th’ ill which doth control’t.

~ William Shakespeare

Turn hell-hound, turn.

~ William Shakespeare

[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.

~ Harold Bloom

How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love hath reason, Reason none, If what parts, can so remain.

~ William Shakespeare

Timon: I’ll beat thee, but I should infect my hands.

~ William Shakespeare

Timon: Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon!

~ William Shakespeare

O mother, mother!What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,The gods look down, and this unnatural sceneThey laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!You have won a happy victory to Rome;But, for your son,--believe it, O, believe it,Most dangerously you have with him prevail'd,If not most mortal to him.

~ William Shakespeare

Tis like she comes to speak of Cassio’s death,The noise was high. Ha! No more moving?Still as the grave. Shall she come in? Were ’t good?I think she stirs again—No. What’s best to do?If she come in, she’ll sure speak to my wife—My wife! my wife! what wife? I have no wife.Oh, insupportable! Oh, heavy hour!Methinks it should be now a huge eclipseOf sun and moon, and that th' affrighted globeShould yawn at alteration.

~ William Shakespeare

Walter looked like he could chew nails and still come back for a helping of chain link fence. “Why can’t Romeo and Juliet meet in a garden like in Downton Abbey?” Romeo asked. “I mean who meets on a balcony? How real is that?

~ Suzanne M. Trauth

What sad, short lives humans live! Each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! Tut-tut, and all that.

~ Stephen King

Let not thy sorrow die, though i am dead.

~ Wililam Shakespeare

I’ll prove the prettier fellow of the two and wear my dagger with the braver grace

~ William Shakespeare

The rest is silence.

~ William Shakespeare

I can say little more than I have studied, and that question's out of my part.

~ William Shakespeare

Then the conceit of this inconstant staySets you rich in youth before my sight,Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,To change your day of youth to sullied night;And all in war with Time for love of you,As he takes from you I engraft you new.

~ William Shakespeare

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.

~ Oscar Wilde

Othello is about many different kinds of love: it’s about the light, beautiful side of love, and it’s about the twisted, darker side of love, and it’s about how, if you flip the emotional coin, love can make you do terrible things. (James Earl Jones)

~ Susannah Carson