Top 100 All Of Shakespeare's Quotes
#1. All of Shakespeare's plays were written under this law of censorship, which is why they are set in the past or in foreign countries, separated from the hot topics of Elizabethan and Jacobean England by the dramatic distance of time or space.
William Shakespeare
#2. Shakespeare is the outstanding example of how that can be done. In all of Shakespeare's plays, no matter what tragic events occur, no matter what rises and falls, we return to stability in the end.
Charlton Heston
#3. There is a history in all men's lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceased, The which observed, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life, which in their seeds And weak beginnings lie intreasured.
William Shakespeare
#4. It is that fery person for all the orld, as just as you will desire; and seven hundred pounds of moneys, and gold, and silver, is her grandsire upon his death's-bed-Got deliver to a joyful resurrections!
William Shakespeare
#5. Cervantes, the soldier and adventurer, rose above the prejudices of his class, while Shakespeare never lifted his eyes beyond the narrow horizon of the Court to which he catered. It was love that opened Cervantes's eye, and it is in all-embracing love that Shakespeare was deficient.
William Shakespeare
#6. It is war's prize to take all vantages;
And ten to one is no impeach of valor.
William Shakespeare
#7. All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures - an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.
Mark Twain
#8. People are always asking me to do Shakespeare - at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It's like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It's great therapy.
Al Pacino
#9. Shakespeare shows you what it is possible to do in English as a writer - but also shows you that you might as well give up. As it's all been done before and hundreds of years ago. So I have had that long-standing relationship of oppression and inspiration.
Chris Adrian
#10. There's nothing serious in mortality;
All is but toys; renown, and grace, is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.
William Shakespeare
#11. First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.
Stephen Greenblatt
#12. Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.
Robert Wilson
#13. One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.
Patrick Stewart
#14. How now! Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
Lady Macbeth
William Shakespeare
#15. When a world of men
Could not prevail with all their oratory,
Yet hath a woman's kindness overrul'd;
William Shakespeare
#16. The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#17. If you're going to do Shakespeare, do Shakespeare. There's a reason why he's been performed for hundreds of years. His words affect people on a very deep level. He's the true humanist. That all comes through his text, his words.
Christian Camargo
#18. Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters ...
C.S. Lewis
#19. The shadow of my sorrow. Let's see, 'tis very true. My griefs lie all within and these external manners of laments are mere shadows to the unseen grief which swells with silence in the tortured soul.
There lies the substance.
William Shakespeare
#20. These growing feathers pluck'd from Caesar's wing
Will make him fly an ordinary pitch,
Who else would soar above the view of men
And keep us all in servile fearfulness.
William Shakespeare
#21. I see men's judgments are A parcel of their fortunes; and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them, To suffer all alike.
William Shakespeare
#22. To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.
Iris Murdoch
#23. Maybe it's true that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But you'd go mad reading all of their rough drafts,
James Browning
#24. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
-Sonnet 73
William Shakespeare
#25. Who has a book of all that monarchs do, He's more secure to keep it shut than shown; For vice repeated is like the wand'ring wind, Blows dust in others' eye, to spread itself; And yet the end of all is bought thus dear, The breath is gone, and the sore eyes see clear To stop the air would hurt them.
William Shakespeare
#26. You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.
Mark Forsyth
#27. Maybe love won't let you down. All of your failures are training grounds and just as your back's turned you'll be surprised ... as your solitude subsides .
William Shakespeare
#28. This is his uncle's teaching, this Worcester, Malevolent to you In all aspects, Which makes him prune himself and bristle up The crest of youth against your dignity.
William Shakespeare
#29. There's a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads onto fortune, omitted, all their voyages end in shallows and miseries. Upon such tide are we now ...
William Shakespeare
#30. HIPPOLYTA
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images
And grows to something of great constancy,
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
William Shakespeare
#31. Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.
William S. Burroughs
#32. Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time was no better and no worse than that of our own - just different.
Jean Aitchison
#33. What's yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid moe thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.
William Shakespeare
#34. Now all the youth of England are on fire,
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies;
Now thrive the armorers, and honor's thought
Reigns solely in the breast of every man.
William Shakespeare
#35. But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.
Julie Taymor
#36. Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks. Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.
William Shakespeare
#37. A man in all the world's new fashion planted, That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.
William Shakespeare
#39. If Shakespeare can compare all of life to a stage, maybe it's not odd to believe that part of the play can take place on a basketball court.
Bill Russell
#41. Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
's been dubbed by [Us] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe [Us]
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.
Tony Harrison
#42. If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it that he himself is aware of.
Thomas Carlyle
#43. But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain;
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
William Shakespeare
#44. It was all there in that little disc-London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.
C.S. Lewis
#45. My parents were not at all backstage parents. We had none of that in the family. It was just very clear right away that I was an actor, even from 4 years old. I've never waited a table. I taught some - I'll teach classes in improv or Shakespeare, but there's some motor in me that needs to do that.
John Michael Higgins
#46. He's of the colour of the nutmeg. And of the heat of the ginger ... he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him; he is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts.
William Shakespeare
#47. There 's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 't is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is 't to leave betimes? Hamlet. V.2
William Shakespeare
#48. As for the play itself, it is perhaps the most popular and well-known of all Shakespeare's works and is also the longest and arguably the most difficult to understand.
William Shakespeare
#49. For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel:
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all
William Shakespeare
#50. Of all mad matches never was the like
Being mad herself, she's madly mated.
William Shakespeare
#51. LEONATO
Neighbours, you are tedious.
DOGBERRY
It pleases your worship to say so, but we are the poor duke's officers; but truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a king, I could find it in
my heart to bestow it all of your worship.
William Shakespeare
#52. Good; and what of him?
ALEXANDER
They say he is a very man per se,
And stands alone.
CRESSIDA
So do all men, unless they are drunk, sick, or have no
legs.
William Shakespeare
#53. This might be the be-all and end-all here, but here, upon this bank and shoal of time, we'd jump the life to come
William Shakespeare
#54. In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?
Roy H. Williams
#55. This was the noblest Roman of them all. All the conspirators save only he Did that they did in envy of great Caesar; [70] He only in a general honest thought And common good to all made one of them. His
William Shakespeare
#56. We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
Robert Wilensky
#57. Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
James Joyce
#58. 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.
Ray Bradbury
#60. Should all despair That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind Would hang themselves.
William Shakespeare
#61. Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.
Trevor Nunn
#62. Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.
Harold Bloom
#63. Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.
Claire Tomalin
#64. All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me
Eugene Ionesco
#65. We are accustomed in England to chalk in rolling downs, except where bitten into by the sea, but elsewhere it is riven and presents cliffs, and these cliffs are not at all like that of Shakespeare at Dover but overhang, where hard beds alternate with others that are friable.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#66. We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.
William Shakespeare
#67. I grew up with Shakespeare, and there are so many wonderful teachings in those plays. The stories are all so unique and timeless. There is just so much learning in that body of work, and that is something I will always go back to.
Juliet Rylance
#68. Love comforeth like sunshine after rain,
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun.
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain;
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done.
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.
William Shakespeare
#69. I am now of all humors that have showed themselves humors
since the old days of goodman Adam to the pupil age of this
present twelve o'clock at midnight.
William Shakespeare
#70. All furnished, all in arms;
All plum'd like estridges that with the wind
Bated like eagles having lately bathed;
Glittering in golden coats like images;
As full of spirit as the month of May
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer;
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.
William Shakespeare
#71. From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things - as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person.
Bill Bryson
#72. A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
Gustav Stresemann
#73. Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.
William Shakespeare
#74. This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.
Mark Akenside
#76. If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, 'This poet lies; Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'
William Shakespeare
#77. Totus mundus agit histrionem. (All the World's a Stage.)
[Motto of William Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (f. 1599) and its acting company, The King's Men; taken from the first play to be performed on the new stage.]
William Shakespeare
#79. Some say that ever 'gainst the season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long: And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor wi
William Shakespeare
#80. Shakespeare had found language for the agony of living with one's own mistakes. There were words for finding yourself isolated with your failures. Phrases for discovering that you were wrong, all, all wrong, wrong, wrong.
Virginia Euwer Wolff
#81. I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity
Harold Bloom
#82. Though now this grained face of mine be hid
In sap-consuming winter's drizzled snow,
And all the conduits of my blood froze up,
Yet hath my night of life some memory,
My wasting lamps some fading glimmer left,
My dull deaf ears a little use to hear.
William Shakespeare
#83. All of Creation's a farce.
Man was born as a joke.
In his head his reason is buffeted
Like wind-blown smoke.
Life is a game.
Everyone ridicules everyone else.
But he who has the last laugh
Laughs longest.
William Shakespeare
#85. In Shakespeare's time, as in ours and all other times, the paths of men and women do not often run in exactly the same directions, except to the common graves that hold us all.
William Shakespeare
#86. When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.
Thom Gunn
#87. A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.
Carol Zaleski
#88. When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice
and many voices have to be suggested.
Pablo Casals
#89. Don't be too precious about your craft ... there's only 26 letters and 12 notes, and Shakespeare and Beethoven said it all better than any of us ever will
David Foster
#91. As with all literature, the play should be read through the eyes of the author, as far as this is possible, which in Shakespeare's case means reading it through the eyes of an orthodox Christian living in Elizabethan England.
William Shakespeare
#92. As a decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite, Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
William Shakespeare
#93. We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted of us has the incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotions. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?
Sherry Turkle
#94. The extreme parts of time extremely forms all causes to the purpose of his speed.
William Shakespeare
#96. Marry, sir, she's the kitchen wench and all grease; and I know not what use to put her to but to make a lamp of her and run from her by her own light.
William Shakespeare
#97. But thoughts the slave of life, and life, Time's fool,
And Time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop.
William Shakespeare
#98. You were used to say extremity was the trier of spirits; that common chances common men could bear; that when the sea was calm all boats alike showed mastership in floating
William Shakespeare
#99. And when he dies, cut him out in little stars, and the face of heaven will be so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no heed to the garish sun.
William Shakespeare
#100. Yeah, but I don't know. There is something about the tragic stories of Shakespeare. It's as if we all know how it will end, but the adventure makes it worth it.
Brittainy C. Cherry
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