Shakespeare Quotes

That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet

~ William Shakespeare

You are full of pretty answers. Have you not been acquainted with goldsmiths' wives and conned them out of rings?

~ William Shakespeare

Nernst was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and it is said that in a conference concerned with naming units after appropriate persons, he proposed that the unit of rate of liquid flow should be called the falstaff.

~ J.r. Partington

If it were possible for a metaphysician to be a golfer, he might perhaps occasionally notice that his ball, instead of moving forward in a vertical plane (like the generality of projectiles, such as brickbats and cricket balls), skewed away gradually to the right. If he did notice it, his methods would naturally lead him to content himself with his caddies's remark-'ye heeled that yin,' or 'Ye jist sliced it.' ... But a scientific man is not to be put off with such flimsy verbiage as that. He must know more. What is 'Heeling', what is 'slicing', and why would either operation (if it could be thoroughly carried out) send a ball as if to cover point, thence to long slip, and finally behind back-stop? These, as Falstaff said, are 'questions to be asked.

~ Peter Guthrie Tait

Here comes a pair of very strange beast, which in all tongues are called fools.

~ Bill 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

I have ridden out all the storms,” said Shakespeare, “even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…

~ Jeanette Winterson

Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. “I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Shakespeare,” he thought as he scribbled away. “Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived.

~ Jeanette Winterson

JAQUES: Rosalind is your love's name?ORLANDO: Yes, just.JAQUES: I do not like her name.ORLANDO: There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened.

~ William Shakespeare

She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.

~ E.m. Delafield

Shakespeare had it right all along: Love will kill you in the end.

~ Raquel Cepeda

Hang there like a fruit, my soul, Till the tree die!-Posthumus LeonatusAct V, Scene V

~ William Shakespeare

Into the breach, then. Against mobs of middle-aged moms and frightening harridans we shall prevail.”She nodded sharply, raising an invisible sword. “And damned be he—she—who cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”“Misquote Shakespeare in front of Samuel, I dare you,” I told her, and she laughed.

~ Patricia Briggs

Hark,” he said, his tone very dry. “What stone through yonder window breaks?”Kami yelled up at him, “It is the east, and Juliet is a jerk!

~ Sarah Rees Brennan

You can quiz me on Petrarch, Medea, Shakespeare or Dante, I know them all, and I’m sorry, but they’ve all gone wrong. Dumb glorified men, writing words about love and life as if they knew. As far as I’m concerned, they didn’t make it out alive either, so I’m sure as hell not going to go to them for advice.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

~ Harold Bloom

Diseases desperate grown,By desperate appliance are relieved,Or not at all.

~ William Shakespeare

If the distinction is not held too rigidly nor pressed too far, it is interesting to think of Shakespeare's chief works as either love dramas or power dramas, or a combination of the two. In his Histories, the poet handles the power problem primarily, the love interest being decidedly incidental. In the Comedies, it is the other way around, overwhelmingly in the lighter ones, distinctly in the graver ones, except in Troilus and Cressida--hardly comedy at all--where without full integration something like a balance is maintained. In the Tragedies both interests are important, but Othello is decidedly a love drama and Macbeth as clearly a power drama, while in Hamlet and King Lear the two interests often alternate rather than blend.

~ Harold C. Goddard

Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you'd better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too.

~ Elizabeth Knox

Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fairTo be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.

~ William Shakespeare

Brutus: Kneel not, gentle Portia.Portia: I should need not, if you were gentle Brutus. Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus, Is it excepted I should know no secrets That appertain to you? Am I yourself But, as it were, in sort or limitation, To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed, And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs Of your good pleasure? If it be no more, Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife.

~ William Shakespeare

Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkissed.

~ William Shakespeare

Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

~ John Irving

willow trees, willow trees they remind me of DesdemonaI'm so damned literaryand at the same time the waters rushing past remindme of nothing

~ Frank O'hara

Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then.

~ Frederick Buechner

Strike as thou didst at Caesar; for I know / When though didst hate him worst, thou loved’st him better / Than ever thou loved’st Cassius.

~ William Shakespeare

Friar Laurence:O, mickle is the powerful grace that liesIn herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities: For nought to vile that on the earth doth live, But to the earth some special good doth give; nor aught so good, but, strain'd from that fair use, Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse: Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime's by action dignified.

~ William Shakespeare

My love is as a fever, longing stillFor that which longer nurseth the disease;Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,The uncertain sickly appetite to please.My reason, the physician to my love,Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,Hath left me, and I desperate now approve,Desire his death, which physic did except.Past cure I am, now reason is past care,And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,At random from the truth vainly express'd;For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

~ William Shakespeare

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment's apotheosis.

~ Jeanette Winterson

By the power of the Tri-Force, I command you to -------

~ Prashna Bari

He was digging in his garden--digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death--and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools they way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last... He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kills us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true--truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams...?

~ Aldous Huxley

...I love Shakespeare, but sometimes....his images - If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head....

~ John Geddes

After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits his goods and places his life at the Doge’s mercy. […] Shakespeare, it seems to me, was willing to introduce what is an absurd implausibility for the sake of an effect which he could not secure without it: at the last moment when, through his conduct, Shylock has destroyed any sympathy we may have felt for him earlier, we are reminded that, irrespective of his personal character, his status is one of inferiority. A Jew is not regarded, even in law, as a brother.

~ W.h. Auden

Ram. My lord constable, the armor that I saw in your tent to-night, are those stars or suns upon it?Con. Stars, my lord.Dau. Some of them will fall to-morrow, I hope.Con. And yet my sky shall not want.Dau. That may be, for you bear a many superfluously, and ’twere more honor some were away.Con. Even as your horse bears your praises; who would trot as well, were some of your brags dismounted.Henry V, 3.7.69-78

~ William Shakespeare

All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Lucentio: I read that I profess, the Art of Love.Bianca: And may you prove, sir, master of your art!Lucentio: While you, sweet dear, prove mistress of my heart!

~ William Shakespeare

[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.

~ Michael D. O'brien

I think he'll be to Rome as is the osprey to the fish, who takes it by sovereignty of nature.

~ William Shakespeare

Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!

~ Charles Dickens