Top 100 Shakespeare's Quotes
#1. Conscience is a blushing, shamefaced spirit than mutinies in a man's bosom; it fills one full of obstacles.
William Shakespeare
#2. Return of love, more blest may be the view;
As call it winter, which being full of care,
Makes summer's welcome thrice more wish'd, more rare.
Sonet56
William Shakespeare
#4. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.
William Shakespeare
#5. There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.
Terri Windling
#6. This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.
Mark Akenside
#7. Where the bee sucks, there suck I
In the cow-slip's bell i lie
There I couch when owls do cry
William Shakespeare
#9. For death remembered should be like a mirror,
Who tells us life's but breath, to trust it error.
William Shakespeare
#10. 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
#11. The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, Joy's soul lies in the doing.
Jonathan Haidt
#12. Be collected.
No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart
There's no harm done.
William Shakespeare
#13. Tis a blushing shame-faced spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom. It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that (by chance) I found. It beggars any man that keeps it.
William Shakespeare
#14. I'm not so naive as to think that everybody always succeeds, right? I mean, half of Shakespeare's stories are tragedies - right?
Michael J. Saylor
#15. 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
#16. The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.
Colin Firth
#18. O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out, / Against the wrackful siege of battering days?
William Shakespeare
#19. If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.
Mortimer J. Adler
#20. GRATIANO
I have a wife I love. I wish she were in heaven so she could appeal to some power to make this dog Jew change his mind.
NERISSA
It's nice you're offering to sacrifice her behind her back. That wish of yours could start quite an argument back at home.
William Shakespeare
#21. Did he so often lodge in open field, In winter's cold and summer's parching heat, To conquer France, his true inheritance?
William Shakespeare
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Whenever I've been asked to be in a film, directors only want me to play myself ... I'm fascinated by the thought of being an actor, but it's too hard. And I think Shakespeare-which has been suggested to me-might be a bit of a stretch.
Tom Jones
#25. And pity, like a new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.
William Shakespeare
#26. The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, which hurts and is desired.
William Shakespeare
#27. People's good deeds we write in water. The evil deeds are etched in brass.
William Shakespeare
#29. In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone.
Juliet Rylance
#30. She captured the spot of my world's centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.
Richard Ronald Allan
#32. 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
#33. The wholesale corruption of social relationships, even the most intimate, is an essential part of Shakespeare's chilling exposure of authoritarian politics.
William Shakespeare
#34. When I closed in "King Lear" I went into a period of depression for about three weeks, and every actor I've talked to who's ever played a major, major Shakespeare role has done this.
Frank Langella
#35. Love comforeth like sunshine after rain,
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun.
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain;
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done.
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.
William Shakespeare
#36. Benvolio: What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?
Romeo: Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
William Shakespeare
#37. Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.
Michael Tippett
#39. Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Harold Bloom
#40. 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
#41. Sir, this young fellow's mother could: whereupon
she grew round-wombed, and had, indeed, sir, a son
for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed.
Do you smell a fault?
William Shakespeare
#43. Wilt thou be daunted at a woman's sight? Aye, beauty's princely majesty is such, Confounds the tongue and makes the senses rough.
William Shakespeare
#44. I must to the barber's, monsieur, for methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face.
William Shakespeare
#45. We were, fair queen, /
Two lads that thought there was no more behind /
But such a day to-morrow as to-day, /
And to be boy eternal.
William Shakespeare
#46. Had I not done Shakespeare, Pinter, Moliere and things such as 'Godspell' - I played Judas in a hugely successful production before I did 'Elm Street' - I'd probably be on a psychiatrist's couch saying: 'Freddy ruined me.' But I'd already done 13 movies and years of non-stop theatre.
Robert Englund
#47. Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
T. S. Eliot
#48. Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann's, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones.
Catharine Arnold
#49. Since Shakespeare had a feel for revolutionary rhetoric, let's all cry: "Peace, freedom and liberty!
Carl William Brown
#50. We will meet; and there we may rehearse most
obscenely and courageously.
Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream. Spoken by Bottom, Act I Sc. 2
William Shakespeare
#51. In my prayers every day, which are a combination of Hebrew prayers and Shakespeare and Sondheim lyrics and things people have said to me that I've written down and shoved in my pocket, I also say the name of every person I've ever known who's passed on.
Mandy Patinkin
#52. So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep. But they are creul tears. This sorrow's heavenly; it strikes where it doth love.
William Shakespeare
#53. Everyone feels loss and love and laughter. That's what connects humanity. It's why I love Shakespeare.
Stephanie Beatriz
#54. Have you not heard it said full oft,
A woman's nay doth stand for naught?
William Shakespeare
#56. But I will be,
A bridegroom in my death, and run into't
As to a lover's bed.
William Shakespeare
#58. Be just, and fear not.
Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's,
Thy God's and truth's.
William Shakespeare
#59. Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love: now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief
William Shakespeare
#62. You couldn't escape the literary atmosphere in our home. I grew up as a Britisher. I played a protagonist of every nationality in stage adaptations of Shakespeare and Brecht. I graduated from Yale. When I moved to the U.S., I realized with some amount of surprise that I was seen as an ethnic actor.
Satya Bhabha
#63. Now he'll outstare the lighting. To be furious
Is to be frightened out of fear, and in that mood
The dove will peck the estridge; and I see still
A diminution in our captain's brain
Restores his heart. When valor preys on reason,
It eats the sword it fights with.
William Shakespeare
#64. Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools.
Erik Qualman
#65. Shakespeare. No one reads Shakespeare in a bar unless it's a ploy to pick up girls. All I'm saying is you might have better luck up front.
Cora Carmack
#66. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honour's at the stake.
William Shakespeare
#67. Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing:
That she beloved knows naught, that knows not this
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.
William Shakespeare
#68. Shakespeare - it's not funny. No matter how they try to make Shakespeare funny, when it's meant to be funny it's not funny.
Julie Walters
#69. By a divine instinct, men's minds mistrust ensuing danger; as, by proof, we see the waters swell before a boisterous storm.
William Shakespeare
#70. Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It's about tempo and change and pulse, whether you're doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.
Diane Paulus
#71. 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
#72. A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it.
William Shakespeare
#73. I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions.
Peter O'Toole
#75. My love is strengthen'd, though more weak in seeming; I love not less, though less the show appear: That love is merchandised whose rich esteeming The owner's tongue doth publish every where.
William Shakespeare
#76. Is it not strange that sheep's guts could hail souls out of men's bodies?
William Shakespeare
#77. 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
#78. KING HENRY VI:
Would I were dead, if God's good will were so;
For what is in this world but grief and woe?
William Shakespeare
#80. The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare.
Daniel Hannan
#81. Shakespeare's plays often turn on the idea of fate, as much drama does. What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides them.
Nate Silver
#83. I am disgraced, impeached, and baffled here,
Pierced to the soul with slander's venomed spear.
William Shakespeare
#84. Shakespeare doesn't belong to the past. If his material is valid, it is valid now. It's like coal. The only meaningfulness of a piece of coal starts and finishes with its combustion, giving us light and heat. And that to me is Shakespeare.
Peter Brook
#85. 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
#86. It's certainly hard to find fault with a work that quotes Shakespeare, Homer, and a dirty limerick about "the young man from Oswego.
Simon Sheppard
#87. Grief hath two tongues; and never woman yet
Could rule them both without ten women's wit.
William Shakespeare
#88. 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
#89. Every man has a bag hanging before him, in which he puts his neighbour's faults, and another behind him in which he stows his own.
William Shakespeare
#90. Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do. And English art. And English literature, except Shakespeare, and he's a German.
E. M. Forster
#92. For Mercutio's soul
Is but a little way above our heads,
Staying for thine to keep him company:
Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him.
William Shakespeare
#93. My favorite play is Hamlet. It was my first love when it comes to Shakespeare, and I've read it and seen it performed more than just about every other Shakespeare play. I've had the "To be or not to be" monologue memorized since I was 15, and it's just really close to my heart.
Ian Doescher
#96. What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?
Al Pacino
#97. Yeah, but I don't know. There is something about the tragic stories of Shakespeare. It's as if we all know how it will end, but the adventure makes it worth it.
Brittainy C. Cherry
#98. In Shakespeare's day it was women who were being burned at the stake as witches ... not men. The men were thought of as alchemists. But women doing the same thing would be a witch and would be burned.
Helen Mirren
#99. I've never taken a script to the stage or to principal photography and said, "This is perfect. This is as good as it can possibly be." It's not Shakespeare, you know; you know it can probably be better.
Harold Ramis
#100. O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you ...
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomi
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep.
William Shakespeare
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