Top 35 Shakespeare Sonnet Quotes
#1. How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? - Sonnet LXV
William Shakespeare
#2. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
-Sonnet 73
William Shakespeare
#3. Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.
William Wordsworth
#4. To give yourself away keep yourself still,
And you must live drawn by your own sweet skill.
William Shakespeare
#5. So are you to my thoughts as food to life, or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground.
William Shakespeare
#6. If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come: so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might;
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compar'd with loss of thee will not seem so.
William Shakespeare
#7. Then, were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
William Shakespeare
#8. Adieu, valour: rust, rapier: be still, drum, for your manager is in love: yea, he loveth. Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit: write, pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio.
William Shakespeare
#9. She was wearing a sleeveless top that held her breasts in the most marvelous way, the balance between what it revealed and what it left to the imagination as poetic as a Shakespearean sonnet.
E.E. Giorgi
#10. To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey'd,
Such seems your beauty still.
William Shakespeare
#11. Elinor Lipman is to tweets what Shakespeare is to sonnets.
Firoozeh Dumas
#12. No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses, reckon up their own;
I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel.
Sonnet 121
William Shakespeare
#14. Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.
William Shakespeare
#15. Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:
The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence's cross.
William Shakespeare
#16. How like a winter hath my absence been
From Thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!
William Shakespeare
#17. Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!
Cynthia Ozick
#18. 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
#19. Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.
William Shakespeare
#20. Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow.
William Shakespeare
#21. The worth of that is that which it contains, and that is this, and this with thee remains. end of Sonnet 74
William Shakespeare
#23. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
William Shakespeare
#24. By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet!
Alfred Enoch
#25. 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
#27. William Shakespeare: I have a wife, yes, and I cannot marry the daughter of Sir Robert De Lesseps. You needed no wife come from Stratford to tell you that, and yet, you let me come to your bed.
Viola De Lesseps: Calf-love. I loved the writer and gave up the prize for a sonnet.
Marc Norman
#28. But, love, hate on; for now I know thy mind.
Those that can see, thou lov'st; and I am blind.
William Shakespeare
#30. But thou art all my art, and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance.
William Shakespeare
#32. For all that beauty that doth cover thee
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me.
How can I then be elder than thou art?
William Shakespeare
#33. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.
James Shapiro
#34. O benefit of ill! Now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruin'd love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuk'd to my content,
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.
William Shakespeare
#35. For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.
William Shakespeare
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