Top 100 Quotes About Macbeth
#1. It must be remembered that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed as epic tales and not as historical texts. To use Shakespeare's Macbeth as a source for 11th-century Scottish politics would rather miss the point of the play, and the same is true of the Homeric epics.
Nic Fields
#2. Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#3. When you're a young man, Macbeth is a character part. When you're older, it's a straight part.
Laurence Olivier
#4. This tune goes manly.
Come, go we to the King. Our power is ready;
Our lack is nothing but our leave. Macbeth
Is ripe for shaking, and the powers above
Put on their instruments. Receive what cheer you may.
The night is long that never finds the day.
They exit.
William Shakespeare
#5. I couldn't be more proud to introduce Anne-Marie Duff, a phenomenal actress who is bursting on the world stage, to Broadway audiences as Lady Macbeth.
Jack O'Brien
#6. 'Macbeth' is one of the best operas ever, and doing it was a great experience. I added some things to the opera based from my experience on the movie - such as some of the special effects and bits of film - to make it new and interesting. It was a very good work and a very good experience.
Dario Argento
#7. Maybe because I'm a nice and sweet person in life, I like the darker roles. The really dark one is Lady Macbeth.
Anna Netrebko
#8. Life repeats Shakespearian themes more often than we think. Did Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and King Claudius exist only in the Middle Ages? Shylock wanted to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the merchant of Venice. Is that a fairy tale?
Varlam Shalamov
#9. I use those medical gloves that fit very tightly and are disposable for all chopping - peppers, onions, garlic, etc. Very Lady Macbeth, I think.
Nora Ephron
#11. And you know, I hate to admit this, but I don't always think in terms of Shakespeare. When I eat, I do. When I'm at a restaurant, I'll think, 'Hmm, what would Macbeth have ordered?'
Liev Schreiber
#12. Richard III is not likeable. Macbeth is not likeable. Hamlet is not likeable. And yet you can't take your eyes off them. I'm far more interested in that than I am in any sort of likeability.
Beau Willimon
#13. It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been.
Paul Scofield
#14. Unsex me here and fill me from crown to toe full of direst cruelty That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose. Macbeth
William Shakespeare
#15. If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth.
Joyce Brothers
#16. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? - Lady Macbeth
William Shakespeare
#17. Macbeth:
If we should fail?
Lady Macbeth:
We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we'll not fail.
William Shakespeare
#19. I want to play Eva Peron. I've already done a lot of Shakespeare, but I'd like to do Lady Macbeth.
Tamara Tunie
#20. We three just stared. I thought of Macbeth's witches huddled around their cauldron. How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags. What is't you do?
A deed without a name.
We were as quiet as the gravestones around us.
Tessa Gratton
#21. Stand not upon the order of your going, But go at once."
Macbeth. Act III Sc. 4, Line 119
Jess Waid
#22. I'm the world's lightest sleeper. On a bad day, I can make Lady Macbeth look like a raging narcoleptic.
Jodi Taylor
#23. The only still center of my life is Macbeth. To go back to doing this bloody, crazed, insane mass-murderer is a huge relief after trying to get my cell phone replaced.
Patrick Stewart
#24. I have been thinking a lot about what we see in villains, how we relate to villains, and what it is about certain villains that we actually empathize with. Like Macbeth. We're not supposed to like a guy who kills the king and takes over, but there's something about him we're really fascinated by.
Finn Wittrock
#25. I'm not -
Lady Macbeth
Lucrezia Borgia
Catherine the Great. I am
- a woman doing what she has to do. I am
- the woman you made me.
Elena is at war.
Don Winslow
#26. That, when they shall be opened, black Macbeth Will seem as pure as snow, and the poor state (55) Esteem him as a lamb, being compared With my confineless harms.
William Shakespeare
#27. 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
#28. I want to do all kinds of things. I want to do some comedy. I'd love to do a romantic comedy, and I'd love to do some period pieces with classical text. I'd love somebody to cast me as Macbeth, but for a film. I just want to be all over the place.
Kevin Alejandro
#29. Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?'
Geraldine Brooks
#30. I felt like I was hobbling, like one oof the old crones from Act I of Macbeth - God knows my hair felt scraggy enough that I must have looked the part.
P.C. Cast
#31. When you are at the right age to play Hamlet you are still to young and immature to play it. It is much later, when you get the life experience and the emotional power, that you understand Hamlet or Macbeth.
Anthony Hopkins
#32. ...we had bypassed Romeo and Juliet and gone straight to Macbeth.
Michael Brooks
#33. I read Macbeth as a secondary student in Nigeria and it was like an African play to me. It had all the right elements - witches, kings and assassinations.
Sefi Atta
#34. I did a production of Macbeth in the 1960s in which I had a swordfight in the final scene. But the blade fell off my sword just as I was stabbing the guy. I ended up having to hammer him to death.
Alan Dale
#35. 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
#36. At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.
Andrew Wyeth
#37. Sawcy, and ouer-bold, how did you dare
To Trade, and Trafficke with Macbeth,
In Riddles, and Affaires of death;
And I the Mistris of your Charmes,
The close contriuer of all harmes,
Was neuer call'd to beare my part,
Or shew the glory of our Art?
William Shakespeare
#38. Shakespeare without Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet would be all too much like Hamlet without the prince.
Brand Blanshard
#39. I'm either the witch or Lady Macbeth of English politics, but someone gotta wear the pants in England when others wearing kilts
Margaret Thatcher
#40. When I was 16, I played Macbeth at school and my English teacher said, 'I think you may have acting talent. Try to get into the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and see where you get.' I wouldn't have thought of that at all. I wanted to be a surgeon, but I wasn't a clever man.
David Suchet
#41. I'm much more likely to get lynched over 'The Killing' than 'Macbeth.'
David Hewson
#42. After making my stage debut aged nine as Macduff's small son in 'Macbeth,' I had played a number of parts, from 'Twelfth Night's Viola to 'The Merchant Of Venice's Portia'.
Felicity Kendal
#44. I always assumed I would leave drama school and do 'Lady Macbeth' and all sorts of serious things. It just didn't happen.
Olivia Colman
#45. My mother had not acted for ten years. Not since a reviewer wrote that her portrayal of Lady Macbeth put him in mind of an exasperated society hostess burdened with unmannerly guests who had lost the new tennis balls, left the bathrooms in a mess, and finished the gin.
Victoria Clayton
#46. You're like Lady Macbeth without the murder." "Thank you. You have no idea how much of a compliment that is to me.
John Corey Whaley
#47. Macbeth as a whole is awash with questions, sometimes questions responded to by another question, which helps to generate an atmosphere of uncertainty, anxiety and paranoid suspicion.
Terry Eagleton
#48. Even if Lady Macbeth could have removed that damn spot, wouldn't her hands have been red from all of the scrubbing?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#49. Many actors want to play Hamlet and Macbeth. Ever since I became an actor, from the very beginning I just wanted to play a Shetland pony. I cannot explain why
Dustin Hoffman
#50. Personally, I don't want to live with limitations. If there comes a time where I am dying to play Juliet or Macbeth, I want to make those avenues for myself.
Danielle Brooks
#51. Although she far outranked Hamish, she had to wait patiently, because this was Lochdubh, where Hamish Macbeth was king.
M.C. Beaton
#52. I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, "The fit is momentary."
Ken Kesey
#53. Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.
Haruki Murakami
#54. Performing a one-man Macbeth feels like the greatest challenge.
Alan Cumming
#55. At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.
Andre Breton
#56. Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis.
Subcomandante Marcos Laura Castellanos
#57. I've never ever read a script. I really must read Macbeth, because I was in it once. I got a lot of laughs in that, I can tell you.
Tom Baker
#58. I can always do theater; I can do Ibsen, I can do Macbeth, I can do Chekhov, I can do Moliere, Othello, I can do Richard III.
Ving Rhames
#59. What bloody man is that, sir?" I tossed the paper in the grate, though there was no fire on this warm summer day. "Bartholomew, you are quoting from Macbeth, did you know? King Duncan in the first scene, which is ominous. He died rather horribly soon after.
Ashley Gardner
#60. A great performance like Lady Macbeth may be forgotten. Writing endures.
Susan Strasberg
#61. Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?
Graham Greene
#62. For me, what Macbeth is about is people who cannot face their fears and pain and instead of facing them and going beyond, they just run away and they try to cover this with power and violence, but it doesn't work.
Marion Cotillard
#63. your son has paid the soldier's price: death. He only lived long enough to become a man, and as soon as he proved that he was a man by fighting like one, he died"
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
#64. My wide eyes make me look much younger without make-up, and although it's fun to have a line in innocence corrupted, I doubt I'll get to play the vampy vixen or a Hedda Gabler or Lady Macbeth.
Talulah Riley
#65. 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
#66. In the power and splendor of the universe, inspiration waits for the millions to come. Man has only to strive for it. Poems greater than the Iliad, plays greater than Macbeth, stories more engaging than Don Quixote await their seeker and finder.
John Masefield
#67. My first part in a play was one of the witches in 'Macbeth.'
Zendaya
#68. If you're a woman doing classic theater, the big roles are often destroyers. I've played Hedda Gabler, Lady Macbeth, some of the Chekhovian heroines, Electra, Phaedra - they're all powerful women, but they're forces of negativity.
Eve Best
#69. Oh, I like going down the rabbit hole. You know, that's kind of my job. When you play Macbeth, you gotta dive down that one. The trick is figuring out how to do it with love and a sense of humor so you can pop back out again. But, kind of the actor's job is to go down the rabbit hole.
Ethan Hawke
#70. I will have thee, as our rarer monsters are, painted upon a pole,and underwrit: Here you may see the tyrant, Macbeth
William Shakespeare
#71. Macbeth to Witches: What are these So wither'd and so wild in their attire, That look not like th' inhabitants o' th' earth, And yet are on 't?
William Shakespeare
#72. She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room.
P.G. Wodehouse
#73. Steve's sales pitch on the NeXT operating system was dazzling," according to Amelio. " He praised the virtues and strengths as though he were describing a performance of Oliver as Macbeth.
Walter Isaacson
#74. A sweaty Macbeth with blood on his arms coming in fresh from the battle doesn't interest me.
Alan Cumming
#75. Macbeth's deed is done in horror, and without the faintest desire or sense of glory- done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling duty; the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand
A. C. Bradley
#76. In the description of night in Macbeth, the beetle and the bat detract from the general idea of darkness - inspissated gloom.
Samuel Johnson
#77. Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep, - the innocent sleep;
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.
William Shakespeare
#78. Bleed, bleed, poor country!Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure;For goodness dares not check thee!His title is affear'd.Shakesp.Macbeth.
Samuel Johnson
#79. I think there is this huge hole in Shakespeare that you do not know why Macbeth is who he is.
David Hewson
#80. I've always wanted to play 'Lady Macbeth' and Strindberg's 'Miss Julie'.
Olivia D'Abo
#81. I'd make a wonderful Lady Macbeth. I'll wear a pair of platform shoes or something.
Bette Midler
#82. The essence of Macbeth is seeing a great and intelligent man succumb to the forces of darkness. What gives the tragedy
William Shakespeare
#84. Only now was it starting to make sense why Lady Macbeth could never scrub the blood off her hands, why it was still there after she washed it away.
Donna Tartt
#85. In The Gulag Archipelago, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarks that Shakespeare's evildoers, Macbeth notably among them, stop short at a mere dozen corpses because they have no ideology.
Theodore Dalrymple
#86. [Macbeth] is historically set in a place depicted by Shakespeare as brutal and violent, incredibly superstitious, and that's something that I do believe is Scottish.
James McAvoy
#87. Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?"
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
#88. Macbeth is a very popular play with audiences. If you want to sell out a theater, just mount a production of Macbeth. It's a short play, it's an exciting play, it's easy to understand, and it attracts great acting.
Ian McKellen
#89. Still it cried 'Sleep no more!' to all the house: 'Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, - Macbeth shall sleep no more!
William Shakespeare
#90. He took the mess that was Macbeth and fixed it, and I wonder if he might, in some small way, be able to do the same for me.
Sarah Dessen
#92. The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.
Mary McCarthy
#93. If you look at the play very closely, this is a thirdhand report of what a wonderful hero Macbeth is for saving Scotland. And in the next scene, he's planning to murder Duncan, and you never really know why or what's behind Macbeth.
David Hewson
#94. The thing that is so singular and stunning about Macbeth - indeed, it strikes one straightaway - is that all the magic Shakespeare put into writing it manages so entirely to harrow and astonish the soul.
William Shakespeare
#95. The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high school.
Jane Smiley
#96. Macbeth is contending with the realities of this world, Hamlet with those of the next.
Jones Very
#97. I'm just having a wonderful time. It's an interesting thing that I'm very comfortable with this material and I don't know why. Maybe it's because I did MacBeth.
F. Murray Abraham
#98. I see Macbeth as a young, open-faced warrior, who is gradually sucked into a whirpool of events because of his ambition. When he meets the weird sisters and hears their prophecy, he's like the man who hopes to win a million - a gamble for high stakes.
Roman Polanski
#99. In the theatre, if you say 'Macbeth', all the actors will start looking very anxious. I'm so well-trained not to say it in the theatre that I can hardly say it in normal life.
Anna Chancellor
#100. There are always two sides to every story, Kelley. Something I learned playing Richard the Third and Macbeth: if you're playing the 'bad guy', you never really think of yourself as bad. It's just that your motives are often ... misunderstood by everyone else.
Lesley Livingston
