Top 100 One Of Shakespeare's Quotes
#1. It's the one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. (That isn't original. I got it out of one of Shakespeare's plays). However,
Jean Webster
#2. There is a special department of Hell for students of probability. In this department there are many typewriters and many monkeys. Every time that a monkey walks on a typewriter, it types by chance one of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Bertrand Russell
#3. I went from an unemployed actor's life to doing stand-up comedy, and that was fortuitous. It's not the usual way the crow flies, going from being in a TV sketch show to playing one of Shakespeare's finest characters, but, hey, that's the way it has happened.
Catherine Tate
#4. This world's a city full of straying streets, and death's the market-place where each one meets.
William Shakespeare
#5. Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.
Barbara De Angelis
#6. 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
#7. Shakespeare in the Park is one of the greatest gifts in New York City. You just have to wait for the tickets - and it's worth the wait.
Jesse L. Martin
#8. 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
#9. If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
George Orwell
#10. Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.
Horace Walpole
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
Norman Mailer
#14. No sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage ...
William Shakespeare
#15. I do beseech you- Though I perchance am vicious in my guess , that your wisdom yet From one that so imperfectly conjects Would take no notice, nor build yourself a trouble Out of his scattering and unsure observance.
William Shakespeare
#16. All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once.
Jim Butcher
#17. 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
#18. Theater, I suppose, is a form of mass mesmerism, and if that's the case, Shakespeare, despite his chemical shortcomings, was surely one of the greatest hypnotists who ever lived.
Alan Bradley
#19. I am always going to be a theater actor at heart. One of my career goals is to do "Shakespeare in the Park" someday but for now I am really excited to get working on another movie.
Michael Stahl-David
#20. What, shall one of us, That struck for the foremost man of all this world But for supporting robbers
shall we now Contaminate our fingers with base bribes, And sell the mighty space of our large honors For so much trash as may be grasped thus?
William Shakespeare
#21. I have always been an impassioned advocate for the works of Shakespeare. I regard him as one of the most complete miracles of his or any other age.
Stephen Fry
#22. We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#23. ( ... )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
#24. 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
#25. Juilliard is wonderful in that they don't pick just one way of working. They give you a palette. There is method acting. There is a lot of attention to Shakespeare and verse.
Christian Camargo
#26. Like one
Who having into truth, by telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory,
To credit his own lie.
William Shakespeare
#27. To put it one way, a collection of Shakespeare's plays is richer than a phone book that uses the same number of letters; to put it another, the essence of information lies in the relationships among bits, not their sheer number.
Hans Christian Von Baeyer
#28. The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.
A.A. Milne
#29. What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?
Virginia Woolf
#30. One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.
Kenneth Branagh
#31. When I was at drama school in the U.K., I was there for two and a half years, and we did one week of television and film. It's right before you leave. It's like, 'We've taught you Chekhov and Shakespeare; you are likely to be in a washing-up soap-liquid commercial.'
James Callis
#32. I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.
William Shakespeare
#33. 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
#34. As good luck would have it, comes in one Mistress Page, gives intelligence of Ford's approach, and in her invention, and Ford's wife's distraction, they conveyed me into a buck-basket.
William Shakespeare
#35. My glass shall not persuade me I am old, So long as youth and thou are of one date; But when in thee time's furrows I behold, Then look I death my days should expiate.
William Shakespeare
#36. That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain's jaw-bone, that did the first murder! It might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o'er-reaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?
William Shakespeare
#37. Shakespeare pulls on us and demands the best of us. You never successfully wrestle one of his plays to the ground and say, 'See? That's It!'
Jack O'Brien
#38. In God's name cheerly on, courageous friends,
To reap the harvest of perpetual peace
By this one bloody trial of sharp war.
William Shakespeare
#39. To judge therefore of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rule is like trying a man by the Laws of one Country who acted under those of another.
Elizabeth Montagu
#40. My wife's liver Infected as her life, she would not live The running of one glass.
William Shakespeare
#41. One of things I'd love to do one day is a Shakespeare with Trevor Nunn. I've done musicals with him, but never Shakespeare. There's no one better.
Hugh Jackman
#42. Let's say there was a burning building and you could rush in and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare's plays or some anonymous human being. What would you do?
Woody Allen
#43. It is war's prize to take all vantages;
And ten to one is no impeach of valor.
William Shakespeare
#44. One of the benefits of being a mature well-educated woman is that you're not afraid of expletives. And you have no fear to put a fool in his place. That's the power of language and experience. You can learn a lot from Shakespeare.
Judi Dench
#45. Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows, which shows like grief itself, but is not so; or sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, divides one thing entire to many objects: like perspectives which, rightly gaz'd upon, show nothing but confusion:
William Shakespeare
#46. Shakespeare's personages live and move as if they had just come from the hand of God, with a life that, though manifold, is one, and, though complex, is harmonious.
Giuseppe Mazzini
#47. Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.
Robert Wilson
#48. It is often noted, for instance, that Shakespeare's plays are full of ocean metaphors ("take arms against a sea of troubles," "an ocean of salt tears," "wild sea of my conscience") and that every one of his plays has at least one reference to the sea in it somewhere.
Bill Bryson
#49. 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
#50. At the beginning of my acting career, I worked for two seasons at the RSC and spent a lot of time in the Cotswolds exploring Shakespeare's countryside. It's my kind of English landscape, with its tiny villages and one-room thatched pubs.
Cherie Lunghi
#51. Not even the tallest mountain of raccoon droppings could ever get in the way of my love for you.'
'That might be the most romantic thing you've ever said to me.'
'It's Shakespeare. One of the sonnets.
Gina Damico
#52. I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
Umberto Eco
#53. Among the accused was the author of Romeo and Juliet, one William Shakespeare.
Neil MacGregor
#54. How DARE you and the rest of your barbarians set fire to my library? Play conqueror all you want, Mighty Caesar! Rape, murder, pillage thousands, even millions of human beings! But neither you nor any other barbarian has the right to destroy one human thought!
William Shakespeare
#55. I had rather be a Kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same Meeter Ballad-mongers: I had rather heare a Brazen Candlestick turn'd, Or a dry Wheele grate on the Axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, Nothing so much, as mincing Poetrie ...
William Shakespeare
#56. Come, swear it, damn thyself, lest, being like one of heaven, the devils themselves should fear to seize thee; therefore be double-damned, swear,
thou art honest.
William Shakespeare
#57. It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught as men take diseases, one of another.
William Shakespeare
#58. In 1600, when Shakespeare's audience at the Globe heard 'Hamlet' for the first time, every one of them knew very well what it meant to be handed a cup of wine by a figure of authority and told to drink.
Neil MacGregor
#59. One pain is lessened by another's anguish ... Take thou some new infection to thy eye, And the rank poison of the old will die.
William Shakespeare
#62. I may be negligent, foolish, and fearful;
In every one of these no man is free ...
William Shakespeare
#63. The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.
Jorge Luis Borges
#64. 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
#65. Oh, take the sense, sweet, of my innocence.
Love takes the meaning in love's conference. I mean that my heart unto yours is knit
So that but one heart we can make of it.
William Shakespeare
#67. It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.
P.G. Wodehouse
#68. I had rather eleven died nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.
William Shakespeare
#69. The city's legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, "Our Carter," even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale, spoke fluent French and German, and recited lengthy passages from Shakespeare.
Erik Larson
#70. Anything one can do to provoke and inspire an interest in the works of Shakespeare in a young audience is fair game. Anything.
Tim Crouch
#71. To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.
William Shakespeare
#72. Shakespeare used the word 'flush' to indicate plenty of money. Well, just remember there was only one Shakespeare, and he was the only one that had a right to use that word in that sense . You'll never be a Shakespeare, there will never be such another - Nature exhausted herself in producing him.
Joseph Devlin
#73. I can't think of anything worse than calling Shakespeare 'highbrow,' because on the one hand, it's brilliant writing. But his plays were popular. People went to see them.
Timothy Dalton
#75. Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But
Bill Bryson
#76. Conscience is a blushing, shamefaced spirit than mutinies in a man's bosom; it fills one full of obstacles.
William Shakespeare
#77. Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
William Shakespeare
#78. O that a lady, of one man refused,
Should of another therefore be abused!
William Shakespeare
#79. 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
#80. 'Othello' is the most domestic of Shakespeare's tragedies and the one that's likely to strike a personal note with a lot of people watching it.
Andrew Davies
#81. I'd like to do a little bit of everything. I think the only thing I can't do is a British accent, so that's out. No Shakespeare for me. Unless it's like one of those modern-day remakes.
Jenny Slate
#82. 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
#83. I've always been influenced by the human form. I'm a big fan of that Shakespeare quote. I tend to leave out the bad part of the paragon of animals quote, because I have this sort of Ayn Rand aesthetic. It was always one of those quotes that inspired me.
Zack Snyder
#84. A blind man can't forget the eyesight he lost, show me any beautiful girl. How can her beauty not remind me of the one whose beauty surpasses hers?
William Shakespeare
#85. It is far easier for me to teach twenty what were right to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.
William Shakespeare
#86. Like one who draws the model of a house beyond his power to build it who, half through, gives o'er, and leaves his part-created cost a naked subject to the weeping clouds.
William Shakespeare
#87. Even as one heat another heat expels, or as one nail by strength drives out another, so the remembrance of my former love is by a newer object quite forgotten.
William Shakespeare
#88. Great Timon, noble, worthy, royal Timon!
Ah, when the means are gone that buy this praise,
The breath is gone whereof this praise is made:
Feast-won, fast-lost; one cloud of winter showers,
These flies are couch'd.
William Shakespeare
#89. Fie, thou dishonest Satan! I call thee by the most modest terms; for I am one of those gentle ones that will use the devil himself with courtesy: sayest thou that house is dark?
William Shakespeare
#90. No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.
Lajos Egri
#91. All the contagion of the south light on you,
You shames of Rome! you herd of
boils and plagues
Plaster you o'er; that you may be abhorr'd
Further than seen, and one infect another
Against the wind a mile!
William Shakespeare
#92. Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words ... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.
Al Pacino
#93. Historically, Macbeth is one of the greatest kings Scotland ever had. He was on the throne for 19 years, and he simply has this dreadful reputation because Shakespeare manipulated history for the benefit of James I, who was paying him to write the play to blacken Macbeth's name.
David Hewson
#94. We are apt to consider Shakespeare only as a poet; but he was certainly one of the greatest moral philosophers that ever lived.
Mary Wortley Montagu
#95. My free drift Halts not particularly, but moves itself In a wide sea of wax; no levelled malice Infects one comma in the course I hold, But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on, Leaving no tract behind.
William Shakespeare
#97. For now I stand as one upon a rock environed with a wilderness of sea, who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave, expecting ever when some envious surge will in his brinish bowels swallow him.
William Shakespeare
#98. Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.
Stephen Greenblatt
#99. Life is an admirable arrangement, isn't it, little mother. It is so clever of it to have June in every year and a morning in every day, let alone things like birds, and Shakespeare, and one's work.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#100. 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
