Top 100 Quotes About Cleopatra
#1. If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd.
I'll set a bourn how far to be belov'd.
Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.
Antony and Cleopatra - Act 1, Scene 1
William Shakespeare
#2. He's meeting his girl now, a girl not much older than 14. A five-and-ten-cents store Cleopatra, a four letter word.
Kurt Vonnegut
#3. It become totally untenable to me that after acting for 25 years - I've played Juliet, Cleopatra and Anne Frank - there I was, sitting in Hollywood, just waiting for somebody to want me.
Susan Strasberg
#4. I would love to play Nefertiti or Cleopatra or the Queen of Sheba. We preserve more male history than we do female. We have to preserve [female history]. No more complaining. We have to do it.
Zoe Saldana
#5. Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lear' in Liverpool, and 'Antony and Cleopatra' at Stratford. One was produced with hardly a backdrop and the other with gigantic scene changes. I was impressed by what connected the two: the words and their life beyond the stage.
Romesh Gunesekera
#6. Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.
Stacy Schiff
#7. As Anthony said to Cleopatra as he opened a crate of ale: Oh, I say, some girls are bigger than others, Some girls' mothers are bigger than other girls' mothers.
Steven Morrissey
#8. Cleopatra was on a political mission to save her country and her power, but what we remember about her are these two famed seductions, which are a matter of politics, not a matter of love.
Stacy Schiff
#9. Powerful women are either sexually voracious rulers like Catherine the Great or Elizabeth I, or treacherous bitches like Cleopatra or Helen of Troy
Bill Gates
#10. We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus's further assertion that Egypt was a country in which the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.
Stacy Schiff
#11. As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation.
Stacy Schiff
#12. The theme of the dance was "Great Romances," or some such nonsense. There were projections of supposedly great couples from the past on the walls of the gym. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Hermione and Ron, Bonnie and Clyde, etc.
Gabrielle Zevin
#13. An epic subject requires a writer of epic skill and scope, and we have a perfect pairing in Cleopatra and Stacy Schiff. Absorbing and illuminating, this new biography will endure.
Jon Meacham
#14. You have to scuba dive in the Alexandrian harbor if you want to see what remains of the lighthouse of Cleopatra's day, and the water in the Alexandrian harbor is not really something you want to come into contact with.
Stacy Schiff
#15. Caesar might have married Cleopatra, but he had a wife at home. There's always something.
Will Cuppy
#16. Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.
Blaise Pascal
#17. Bernice III was the first queen of Egypt to rule without a consort in over a millennium. Though her reign was brief, her example inspired her descendant Cleopatra to rule alone.
Kris Waldherr
#18. It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.
Stacy Schiff
#19. But the ifs of history: if Cleopatra's nose had been one inch longer,' he said, 'would Antony have lost the battle of Actium?
William Dalrymple
#20. Of the seventy-five names, an astonishing fourteen are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Think about that for a moment. Historians start with Cleopatra and the
Malcolm Gladwell
#21. What we know about Cleopatra's looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority.
Stacy Schiff
#22. [On vanity:] The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the face of the earth would have changed.
Blaise Pascal
#23. The truth is very few of us are related to Napoleon or Cleopatra. Although, those are bad examples as I am actually descended from both of them.
Jim Piddock
#24. If fourteen people believe they were Cleopatra in a former life, does that mean that Cleopatra had split personality disorder?
Patricia Briggs
#25. From every ancient source, we have testimony to Cleopatra's irresistible charm, as Plutarch has it, to her ability to speak many languages including, as he puts it, the language of flattery and essentially, to be able to turn people to her will - really a great political genius, in that respect.
Stacy Schiff
#26. I have never wanted to be a queen! Cleopatra was a role, and I am an actor, so it was fun to play one, but it's not real.
Elizabeth Taylor
#27. No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.
Stacy Schiff
#28. A commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy, and governance; fluent in nine languages; silver-tongued and charismatic, Cleopatra nonetheless seems the joint creation of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors.
Stacy Schiff
#29. It was rare to find a member of the family who did not liquidate a relative or two, Cleopatra VII included.
Stacy Schiff
#31. The interesting thing about Cleopatra is that she is such a shape-shifter. I mean through history we've all molded her to our times and our places. So there's room for a movie for her, but I don't think it will hew to the book.
Stacy Schiff
#32. There was good reason why Cleopatra's subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions.
Stacy Schiff
#33. Caesar tarried in Egypt, Taking in all the spoils, The Lighthouse, the Library, Queen Cleopatra and Her many-perfumed oils.
Margaret George
#34. I will wait for Cleopatra, for I know my time must come. And I'm getting ready for wherever she'll be at-tra, cause I'm getting stronger now and not so dumb.
Jonathan Richman
#35. By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.
Stacy Schiff
#36. Cleopatra: Give me to drink Mandragora.
Charmian: Why, madam?
Cleopatra: That I might sleep out this great gap of time my Antony is away.
William Shakespeare
#37. I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.
Richard Flanagan
#38. Le nez de Cle opa" tre: s'il e u" t e te plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait change . Cleopatra'snose: if it had beenshorter the whole face of the earth would have been different.
Blaise Pascal
#39. We can not blame Shakespeare for making use of cutthroats and villains in developing his plots, but we might have been spared the jokes which the jailors of Posthumus perpetrate when they come to lead him to the scaffold, and the ludicrous English of the clown who supplies Cleopatra with an asp.
William Shakespeare
#40. The studio system collapsed only when Elizabeth Taylor charged $1 million for Cleopatra.
Leslie Caron
#41. Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.
Malcolm Gladwell
#42. There is a certain kind of respect for authenticity today that there wasn't back in the days when they did 'Cleopatra,' where everything looked like a giant motel. People want to have it be authentic in the look, and authentic in the way people behave.
John Milius
#43. I'm probably the highest paid outdoor entertainer since Cleopatra,
Gypsy Rose Lee
#44. She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek ... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.
John Henrik Clarke
#45. Cleopatra had one great advantage. She lived at a time when female sovereigns were not anomalies. And when women enjoyed rights they would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years. You could call them early feminists, if I may use a dirty word.
Stacy Schiff
#46. I went out to the desert where Cleopatra camped out with her mercenary army. It's a desolate outpost. Nothing has changed since her day. You realize how far she had to travel. Not only is it a good 150 miles against the current, you can't take a ship.
Stacy Schiff
#47. Not romantic," she disagreed. "To me it would be romantic if Antony properly fell on his sword and kicked the bucket and Cleopatra escaped and lived a lovely life sailing along the Nile without him and his big ideas ruining her kingdom.
Jack Gantos
#48. She knew neither that she was living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra.
Stacy Schiff
#49. If you are really Master of your Fate, it shouldn't make any difference to you whether Cleopatra or the Bearded Lady is your mate.
Ogden Nash
#50. The legion was raised by Mark Antony. He filled the ranks with men from Cleopatra's army. When Antony was defeated by Octavian, the Twenty-Second was integrated into the rest of the army and has been stationed on the Nile since then. They're a mix of Greeks and Egyptians from the Nile cities.
Simon Scarrow
#51. Champagne with its foaming whirls/As white as Cleopatra's pearls.
Lord Byron
#52. I'm tired of watching as men destroy all the world. Everything used to be beautiful when women were in charge, and now I, working as the physical manifestation of the goddess Isis and the reincarnation of Cleopatra, have decided to save the world.
Roseanne Barr
#53. Snooki is really beautiful and looks quite like Elizabeth Taylor in 'Cleopatra.' She has the same bone structure. I'm kind of obsessed with 'Jersey Shore.' People don't give them enough credit for how entertaining they are.
Margaret Cho
#54. As Antony said to Cleopatra, as he opened a crate of ale;
Oh I say, some girls are bigger than others.
Morrissey
#55. CLEOPATRA: My salad days,
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,
To say as I said then! But, come, away;
Get me ink and paper:
He shall have every day a several greeting,
Or I'll unpeople Egypt.
William Shakespeare
#56. I wouldn't dare to speculate as to Cleopatra's falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that.
Stacy Schiff
#57. In 'Plutarch,' her voice begins to come out; there are actual 2,000-year-old quotes from Cleopatra, and they are sly and saucy.
Stacy Schiff
#58. They sounded a lot like me and my old girlfriend Loretta, but I swore to myself that I would stop thinking about her ass, even though every Cleopatra-looking Latina in the city made me stop and wish she would come back to me.
Junot Diaz
#59. For all its erudition, Cleopatra's Egypt produced no fine historian.
Stacy Schiff
#60. Antony and Cleopatra: "what love, what accomplishments, what repetitions of natural affections passed between them is not for vulgar minds to imagine, none but so great hearts know them.
James Shapiro
#61. I'm so excited that my label Rocker Records has partnered with Cleopatra Records to put out this collection of RARE and UNIQUE kick ass rock !!!
Carmine Appice
#62. Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved.
Stacy Schiff
#63. No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra's world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer's work was the Bible of the day.
Stacy Schiff
#64. Diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious
Stacy Schiff
#65. I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, 'What can we know about her education?' It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.
Stacy Schiff
#66. The history of representations of Cleopatra provides one of the clearest instances of the conviction that whiteness is the pinnacle of human beauty. Cleopatra became a byword for feminine beauty in European culture, but in the process she had to be represented as white. As
Richard Dyer
#67. Vanity is illustrated in the cause and effect of love, as in the case of Cleopatra.
Blaise Pascal
#68. Watch constantly against those things which are thought to be no temptations. The most poisonous serpents are found where the sweetest flowers grow. Cleopatra was poisoned by an asp that was brought to her in a basket of fair flowers. Sharp-edged tools, long handled, wound at last.
Charles Spurgeon
#69. These heads sheltered by umbrellas
be they of Zeb-un-Nisa, or Catherine
of Cleopatra or Fenichka
live with their own stories
Suman Pokhrel
#70. Her name was Zenobia and she was a descendant of Cleopatra. She
Nujeen Mustafa
#71. I'm very aware that after you've played Cleopatra, there's not a lot that can top that in this sphere, so it means that I want to almost change the sphere I work in rather completely because I will always be comparing it to Cleopatra.
Harriet Walter
#72. CLEOPATRA: If it be love indeed, tell me how much. ANTONY: There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned. CLEOPATRA: I'll set a bourne how far to be belov'd. ANTONY: Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.
William Shakespeare
#73. The movie I was working on, "Cleopatra", it's about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that's what every story is about.
Jess Walter
#74. While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.
Stacy Schiff
#75. She came to the Cleopatra and her attention was immediately drawn to the side-by-side Tigris and Euphrates Towers. Her
Michael Connelly
#76. huffed out. "Tell me the truth. Did you actually invite her over?" Her voice held a tinge of the venom that had done in Cleopatra, so not her. "No! Christ almighty! Were you spying on me?" "I wouldn't have
Ava Miles
#77. I really don't remember much about Cleopatra. There were a lot of other things going on.
Elizabeth Taylor
#78. Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous.
Stacy Schiff
#79. Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered.
Stacy Schiff
#80. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks played no role.)
Stacy Schiff
#82. Girls have always wanted to be pretty, even in Egyptian times. Cleopatra wore all that eyeliner, you know.
Rita Ora
#83. You still don't get it, do you, Margaret?' Kat smiled almost sadly. 'We never had to steal the Antony. All we had to do was get it next to the Cleopatra and switch the signs.
Ally Carter
#84. Antony shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' th' posture of a whore.
William Shakespeare
#85. For ten generations her family had styled themselves pharaohs. The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.
Stacy Schiff
#86. I never really thought about how when I look at the moon, it's the same moon as Shakespeare and Marie Antoinette and George Washington and Cleopatra looked at.
Susan Beth Pfeffer
#88. All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise.
Cleopatra
#89. I had come to Rome in chains, but I would leave Rome a queen.
Stephanie Dray
#90. Fool! Don't you see now that I could have poisoned you a hundred times had I been able to live without you.
Cleopatra
#91. Be it known that we, the greatest, are misthought.
Cleopatra
#92. 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
#93. THOMASINA:
But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!
Tom Stoppard
#94. The shadows of twilight grow,
And the tiger's ancient fierceness
In my veins begins to flow.
William Wetmore Story
#96. If you find him sad, say I am dancing. If in mirth, report that I am sudden sick.
William Shakespeare
#97. I knew that a man was not only himself but also who he wished to be.
Stephanie Dray
#98. So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.
Margaret George
#99. The April's in her eyes: it is love's Spring,
And these the showers to bring it on..
William Shakespeare
#100. [At Marc Antony's tomb:] Nothing could part us in life, but now in death we are likely to change places, you the Roman lying here in Egyptian soil, and I, helpless woman that I am, being buried in Italy.
Cleopatra
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