Top 100 All Shakespeare Quotes
#1. First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.
Stephen Greenblatt
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Since Shakespeare had a feel for revolutionary rhetoric, let's all cry: "Peace, freedom and liberty!
Carl William Brown
#7. Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.
Harold Bloom
#8. 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
#9. Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It's about tempo and change and pulse, whether you're doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.
Diane Paulus
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. With 'True Grit,' the language was very specific, as is Shakespeare. You couldn't really improvise, nor would you really ever have to. I never felt the need to. It was all so beautifully written, and it was all right there.
Hailee Steinfeld
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. And now about the cauldron sing
Like elves and fairies in a ring,
Enchanting all that you put in.
William Shakespeare
#16. I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.
Laura Bates
#17. 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
#18. A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.
Carol Zaleski
#19. I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.
Howard Barker
#20. Each of my Shakespeare pieces is different to the other, but each espouses a set of philosophies common to all my theatre work.
Tim Crouch
#21. Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others.
Mark Twain
#22. It was a wonderful experience to live the life for a year; to spend all day doing Shakespeare and then do a play in the evening.
Phil Daniels
#24. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
William Faulkner
#25. Not like Homer would I write,
Not like Dante if I might,
Not like Shakespeare at his best,
Not like Goethe or the rest,
Like myself, however small,
Like myself, or not at all.
William Allingham
#26. Shakespeare's language does not require a British accent. It requires a facility with language, and that's all.
Joss Whedon
#27. When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare.
Aubrey Beardsley
#28. As for sex, well, I mean sex is a perfectly respectable subject as far as Shakespeare is concerned. I mean, all history is love and violence.
Ian Fleming
#29. To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.
I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
Emil Cioran
#30. He stepped away from me to talk, and I leaned heavily against the wall beside his door. Clearly, I was not meant to have sex. This was God telling me that I was meant to be a nun. Get thee to a nunnery, and all that crap. I was so delirious I was confusing God and Shakespeare.
Cora Carmack
#31. ( ... )we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.
Bill Bryson
#33. My father quoted everyone, from Shakespeare to Emerson, on the subject of destiny, and then he'd point out that except for the Greeks, everyone agreed: The stars do fuck-all for us; you must make your own way.
Amy Bloom
#34. I did about 2000 covers altogether, for all sorts of books - from Shakespeare to James Bond - and I always had the idea that I must give 100%, no matter who the author was.
Dick Bruna
#35. Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.
Edward Bond
#36. There is nothing new, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare to every romcom ever made, we're just reimagining the same 12 story plots over and over again - so what makes people keep watching and listening? It's all about the character.
Jeremy Renner
#37. The unseen energy that was once in Shakespeare or Picasso or Galileo or any human form, is also available to all of us. That is because the spirit energy does not die, it simply changes form.
Wayne Dyer
#38. No one pretends that Shakespeare was (divinely) inspired, and yet all the writers of the books of the Old Testament put together, could not have produced Hamlet.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#39. I wasn't always such a great fan of Shakespeare, mind you. I can guess we all at one time had it rammed down our necks at school, which tends to take the edge off it.
Christopher Eccleston
#40. The happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance is not the works of Shakespeare (as Buck Mulligan says) but the Holy Bible.
Paul Theroux
#41. Impressive, most impressive, worthy lad,
Thine Obi-Wan hath taught thee well, and thou
Hast master'd all thy fears. Now, go! Release
Thine anger, for thy hate alone can strike
Me down!
Ian Doescher
#42. I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.
George Bernard Shaw
#43. When you're playing Shakespeare, it forces you to think and feel and speak all at the same time, which really is what acting is. It expands your imagination and expands your size of thinking.
Andre Holland
#44. A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken."
Thomas C. Foster
#45. Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.
Abel Gance
#46. [Measure for Measure] leaves me with the sense that life is all there is, so we might as well live it as best we can; that being human is not a given something we have to strive for. That the reason we are here is to live and that this involves making many difficult judgements.
Roger Allam
#47. I enjoy doing martial arts films, but I like the straight stuff, too. I'd like to go back and do some Shakespeare, and maybe knock out a play or two. It's all about keeping balance.
Thomas Ian Griffith
#48. Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
Jeanette Winterson
#49. All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
Jonathan Kozol
#50. 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
#51. Subtract from many modern poets all that may be found in Shakespeare, and trash will remain.
Charles Caleb Colton
#52. It's not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people's costumes and pretending to be people that they're not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?
Jonathan Miller
#53. For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery.
Louise Erdrich
#54. Auden? Does he rhyme? I only like poetry that rhymes. All
the best poets write in rhyme."
"Really?"
"Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare. You can't do better than that.
Shiela Jane
#55. A comedy isn't about being funny ... a comedy is about characters who dare to know that they may choose a happy ending after all.
Gary D. Schmidt
#56. Do you like Shakespeare?" he asks me. An odd segue.
I shake my head. "All I know about him is that he stole my name and spelled it wrong.
Tahereh Mafi
#57. Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us to know one another.
Matthew Pearl
#58. To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, I wish I had known this some time ago.
Roger Zelazny
#59. Shakespeare said, "Kill all the lawyers." There were no agents then.
Robin Williams
#60. 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
#61. A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller: he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way and sure to engulf him in the mire.
Samuel Johnson
#62. Who knows himself a braggart, let him fear this, for it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass.
William Shakespeare
#64. What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays - all of them but one or two - thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death - the justly revered First Folio.
Bill Bryson
#65. I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense ... I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.
Anthony Hopkins
#66. Shakespeare is all big themes, like the most amazing love, or the most scary war.
Anna Torv
#67. 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
#68. One of the things that gives me a lot of pleasure about both the solo show and the book is that it tells people about my dad. He really was an important man. He was a kind of pioneer of regional theater. He was the first American producer to ever produce all of Shakespeare plays.
John Lithgow
#69. These are sad days in literature. Homer is dead. Shakespeare is dead. And I myself am not feeling at all well.
Mark Twain
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeare's mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves nature's active part.
William Carlos Williams
#74. I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.
John Logan
#75. But they took readily to Shakespeare, as all children do when he is not made horrible with parsing and analysing.
George Orwell
#76. Of all mad matches never was the like
Being mad herself, she's madly mated.
William Shakespeare
#77. The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
Patti Smith
#78. As an actress and comedienne, I'm a huge fan of he theatre and the Tricycle in Kilburn is my favourite in London. I dragged my kids to a performance of 'Twelfth Night' there, where they handed out pizza. Who knew that all it takes to get children interested in Shakespeare is a snack?
Arabella Weir
#79. Later, I came to see that Mr. Dickens and Mr. Wordsworth were thinking of men like me when they wrote their words. But most of all, I believe that Mr. Shakespeare was. Mind you, I cannot always make sense of what he says, but it will come.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#80. Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.
Leonard Maltin
#81. It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.
M.H. Abrams
#82. All religions are inconsistent with mental freedom. Shakespeare is my bible, Burns my hymn-book.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#83. My soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.
Soren Kierkegaard
#84. For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes.
Ismail Kadare
#85. People take England on trust, and repeat that Shakespeare is the greatest of all authors. I have read him: there is nothing that compares Racine or Corneille: his plays are unreadable, pitiful.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#86. I don't make any distinction between a popular TV series or blockbuster film and doing Shakespeare. They're different, but as long as the material is good and the intention is honourable, it's all the same to me.
Ian McKellen
#87. 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
#88. The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.
John Dunning
#89. 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
#90. In Shakespeare's plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine.
Samuel Johnson
#91. You realize Shakespeare wasn't stuck for an idea when he said, 'All the world's a stage.'
Peter Riegert
#92. 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
#93. You will never see the ends of his armies. They blanket the Earth as a storm blankets the sky, but the sun will never rise again."
I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, yeah. You demonic all think you're Shakespeare. Really nice. Good-bye." Then I took off her head and the rest of her burned up.
Courtney Allison Moulton
#94. 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
#95. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare
Jorge Luis Borges
#96. 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
#97. I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.
Orlando Bloom
#98. I went to drama school for three years, and the whole thing there is that hopefully you are introduced to a man called William Shakespeare who is the greatest of all time of all storytelling.
Hayley Atwell
#99. What is a 'thing'? All is movement, a flowing. How stupid it is to speak of the 'mind'. There is a body; there is a mind: they are mixed up together. Shakespeare with a hole in his sock will not write the sonnet of a Shakespeare with socks intact.
Kenneth Patchen
#100. Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.
William Butler Yeats
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
