Top 85 Great Shakespeare Quotes
#1. The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.
Ian McEwan
#2. All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. 'Alas, poor Yorick,' that's about death. And in 'Romeo and Juliet' everyone up ends up dying. The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.
Ray Winstone
#3. Was there ever such thing as great Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you - what - was there not sad stuff?
George III
#4. I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.
Julie Walters
#5. 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
#6. If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.
James Rozoff
#7. James Agate, a great critic of the day, advised me that the way to learn your job properly was to learn Shakespeare, so I went to Stratford. It really sorts out the men from the boys.
Donald Sinden
#8. 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
#9. Our fictions move us to do great things, things worth doing for no better reason than there's poetry in us. We dream before we do.
Bill Willingham
#10. Was there ever such stuff as great as part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you? - What? - Is there not sad stuff? What? - What?
George III
#11. The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
Robert Browning
#12. 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
#13. I remember, after graduating high school, I got a part in a play with the Washington Shakespeare Festival - a little part. But I remember thinking this would be a great way of making a living ... to be an actor. I never really thought I'd make a lot of money at it.
Daniel Stern
#14. In the great and deep qualities of mind, heart, and soul, there is no change. Homer and Solomon speak to the same nature in man that is reached by Shakespeare and Lincoln. but in the accidents, the surroundings, the change is vast. All things now are mobile
movable.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#15. A condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.
John Connolly
#16. 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
#17. Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#18. Worldwide travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all-certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia.
Jan Morris
#19. I want to be known as 'The Big Shakespeare.' It was Shakespeare that said, 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them.'
Shaquille O'Neal
#20. [Judith Shakespeare] lives in you and in me [ ... ] she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.
Virginia Woolf
#21. Tragedy is a great storytelling form. It worked extremely well for Shakespeare. It worked extremely well for Jim Cameron with 'Titanic.'
Carlton Cuse
#22. I did my English A level in England, and we studied Shakespeare. I had great, great high school teachers, and we parsed the text within an inch of its life.
Joss Whedon
#23. 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
#24. What! have you no poems by heart, no great songs, no verses from the Bible, no speeches from Shakespeare? Then you have not begun to read, you have not learned how to read.
John Macy
#25. English literature is a glorious inheritance which is open to all - there are no barriers, no coupons, and no restrictions. In the English language and in its great writers there are great riches and treasures, of which, of course, the Bible and Shakespeare stand along on the highest platform.
Winston Churchill
#26. Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.
Richard Flanagan
#27. If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did ... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.
Michael Morpurgo
#28. When I first started acting, and we would all sit down and talk about Shakespeare and how great it was. I thought well, I suppose it is.
Judy Davis
#29. I think working on Shakespeare was a big part of my time at drama school. I'm so glad that I got to know Shakespeare and got a chance to play great parts in Shakespeare, because it really teaches you - or taught me, anyway - everything.
Andre Holland
#30. Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.
Mark Ruffalo
#31. In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Aaron Lazar
#32. I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
Alan Lightman
#33. There are some great roles mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.
Peggy Ashcroft
#34. I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: 'Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.' It works wonders.
Martin Amis
#35. I believe kids shouldn't be taught Shakespeare. They should experience it first by seeing a great production.
Helen Mirren
#36. 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
#37. In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?
Virginia Postrel
#38. [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
#39. We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.
T. S. Eliot
#40. Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?
Edward Abbey
#42. I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I'm not feeling so well myself.
Mark Twain
#43. I owe a great deal to Harold Hobson, doyen drama critic of the 'U.K. Sunday Times,' who championed me as Shakespeare's Richard II at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival.
Ian McKellen
#44. For works of the mind really great there is no old age, no decrepitude. It is inconceivable that a time should come when Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, should not ring in the ears of civilized man.
William E. Gladstone
#45. When we are born, we cry that we are to come to this great stage of fools,' I quoted from Shakespeare's King Lear.
Brittainy C. Cherry
#46. A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet ... yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
Edgar Allan Poe
#47. It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books.
Ally Carter
#48. There's a reason Tony Stark makes fun of 'Thor,' and mentions 'Shakespeare' in the park in 'The Avengers.' It's great to play high drama and comedy alongside a modern story.
Joss Whedon
#49. Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#50. The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.
George Bernard Shaw
#51. The stage can be defined as a place where Shakespeare murdered Hamlet and a great many Hamlets murdered Shakespeare.
Robert Morse
#52. After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.
Claire Tomalin
#53. Shakespeare is a great psychologist, and whatever can be known of the heart of man may be found in his plays.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#54. Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
William Golding
#55. Our understanding of Shakespeare already depends largely on the vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each man must live in his own generation, as the saying is; but the generations are bound together by the golden links of the great tradition of civilization.
George Edward Woodberry
#56. In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches.
Herman Melville
#57. Shakespeare didn't conceive of his tragedy in Aristotelian terms - that is, as a tragedy of the fall of a flawed great man - but rather as a collision of deeply held and irreconcilable principles, embodied in characters who are destroyed when these principles collide.
James Shapiro
#58. My father started out as a riveter, but he had the soul of an artist. He worshiped Shakespeare and had aspirations to be an actor. He claimed that from the first day he laid eyes on me, I was going to be this great dramatic actress.
Christine Ebersole
#59. With an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.
Nadine Gordimer
#60. 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.
Alfred North Whitehead
#61. Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
Eugene Ionesco
#62. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.
Julia Stiles
#63. 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
#64. Shakespeare has great ability to skirt around a subject and portray human nature.
Kelli O'Hara
#65. The great William Shakespeare said, "What's in a name?" He also said, "Call me Billy one more time and I will stab you with this ink quill.
Cuthbert Soup
#66. Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare ... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.
Victor Hugo
#67. If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
Virginia Woolf
#68. King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare - or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.
Paul Scofield
#69. Shakespeare's great."
Duh. Shakespeare's cool, man.
Alex Flinn
#70. When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.
Annette Bening
#71. My father was an athlete, a great athlete, fought in the Marines in World War I. He was all sports and activity. My mother was all academics. I still have the complete works of Shakespeare that she had.
Marv Levy
#72. Like all men is distress,Gideon decided to do what Napoleon, what Shakespeare, what Alexander the Great would have done. There remained only the minor question, what is that?
Robert Louis Stevenson
#73. Great, Kelly thought, a knot of fear tightening her stomach. A mugger with a taste for Shakespeare. This could only happen in Cental Park.
Lesley Livingston
#74. Shakespeare's plays were a great Teutonic Valhalla with brilliant sunshine at times and violent tempests at others. The world to him was a battlefield, but his sense of poetic justice, his sublime faith in life and its infinite resources, guided the battles.
Bjornstjerne Bjornson
#75. Reading old Gray? That's right. Physician's library just three books: 'Gray's Anatomy' and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great doctor.
Sinclair Lewis
#76. When he was alive, you shared a great affinity. A love of writing, books, Shakespeare, journalism, a certain way of looking at the world," Marla says. "You must have felt very validated by him, understood for who you were. Your incredible connection to him was very empowering.
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
#77. 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
#78. Whoever wrote Shakespeare is a working class hero be he an aristocrat or a peasant. Shakespeare is a great leveler. We're presented with kings, queens, emperors and giants who feel the same things as everyone else: jealousy, love, anger, bitterness, grief, loss.
Rhys Ifans
#79. Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
Harold Bloom
#80. Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the child of that great movement, and marks its height as it penetrated the North with civilization.
George Edward Woodberry
#81. It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy - about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind.
Daniel Keyes
#82. For the company of the great is good company as Shakespeare understood it, as Plutarch understood it. The past remains the source from which example and precept can still be drawn.
C.V. Wedgwood
#83. One of the reasons why I love to do Shakespeare is that this great artist was able to talk to a wide variety of audiences. He could do the bawdy plays and the humor and the clowns-as you know, because you're a wonderful Stephano-that speaks to the populace, the masses, the groundlings, whatever.
Julie Taymor
#84. Long hours, hard labor, or burning the midnight oil will not produce a Milton, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. People accomplish great things through quiet moments, imagining that the invisible things from the foundation of time are clearly visible. You can imagine
Joseph Murphy
#85. I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.
Ian Doescher
