Top 100 Shakespeare's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.
Stephen Greenblatt
#3. You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are even worse.
Leo Tolstoy
#4. In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.
Oscar Wilde
#5. Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.
Lord Byron
#6. 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
#8. Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.
Robyn Schneider
#9. WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles
James Shapiro
#10. I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.
Neil Patrick Harris
#11. Shakespeare's work had a liberating influence.
Paul C. Nagel
#12. Shakespeare's last play was called The Tempest. It wasn't called just plain Tempest. The name of my record is just plain Tempest. It's two different titles,
Bob Dylan
#13. Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io.
Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.
Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.
Dan Simmons
#14. One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.
Terry Teachout
#15. If you haven't read Shakespeare's Hamlet yet, it means that you haven't reached the summit of the literature yet!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#16. You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy.
Robyn Schneider
#17. Shakespeare's stories are still very strong. He structured fantastic stories about things that were fundamental to the human being and psyche.
James McAvoy
#18. Anger's my meat; I sup upon myself, And so shall starve with feeding. Volumnia says this in Shakespeare's Coriolanus. She - steely, controlling - is far more interesting than Coriolanus. Alas, nobody would go to see a play called Volumnia.
Lauren Groff
#19. Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
Stephen Greenblatt
#20. Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#21. Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
Harold Bloom
#22. Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time was no better and no worse than that of our own - just different.
Jean Aitchison
#23. 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
#24. I want to take a trip to Shakespeare's brain and vacation there with his thoughts may be I also start writing about twisted love and betrayals.
Megha Khare
#25. I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.
Trevor Nunn
#26. But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.
Julie Taymor
#27. Shakespeare's taught me that there are more words in the English language than I have got in my head.
Zoe Wanamaker
#28. I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.
Lauren Groff
#29. The hardest part of writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was probably the sheer amount of iambic pentameter and tiptoeing around certain scenes I knew would be hot-button issues for 'Star Wars' fans.
Ian Doescher
#30. Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)
Gilbert Highet
#31. If you look at Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.
Tom Hooper
#32. There are some great roles mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.
Peggy Ashcroft
#33. In Shakespeare's plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine.
Samuel Johnson
#35. I'm constantly intimidated by Shakespeare's work. Trying to decipher what he's saying and holding on to that thought - not just as an actor, but as a human being - is a rigour.
Zoe Wanamaker
#36. I've definitely learned that if you want to have power as a woman in Shakespeare's time, and it's still relevant today, that you have to play a different game than men play, and you have to be a lot cleverer.
Samuel Barnett
#37. In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?
Virginia Postrel
#38. If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it that he himself is aware of.
Thomas Carlyle
#39. What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history.
(In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III')
Paul Murray Kendall
#40. Shakespeare's felicity is so often taught
it is easy to overlook how taut
the sinews in his neck must
have been when he grasped his pen, or the musk
that exuded from the fat of his chin
below a somewhat chthonic grin
life wrestled death on his desk when he composed.
B.J. Ward
#41. I owe a great deal to Harold Hobson, doyen drama critic of the 'U.K. Sunday Times,' who championed me as Shakespeare's Richard II at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival.
Ian McKellen
#42. 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
#43. Shakespeare's so bloody difficult, and I don't like failure. You can fail on film, but there's nobody actually there in the flesh to watch you failing.
Anthony Hopkins
#44. I felt it [Shakespeare's Coriolanus] is sort of an examination of our dysfunction as a nationalistic, tribal entities. I think the world is rocking and cracking open in weird and worrying places. And I think Coriolanus, the play, reflected that.
Ralph Fiennes
#45. 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
#46. As for the play itself, it is perhaps the most popular and well-known of all Shakespeare's works and is also the longest and arguably the most difficult to understand.
William Shakespeare
#47. Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do.
Ian McKellen
#48. There is no higher or purer pleasure than to sit with closed eyes and hear a naturally expressive voice recite ... a play of Shakespeare's.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#49. I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare's work - that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it's very real because it's so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.
Rufus Wainwright
#50. People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages.
George Weinberg
#51. 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
#52. From the American retelling of Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story to the Japanese adaptation of King Lear in Ran, Shakespeare's cultural influence is virtually limitless.
Gordon Smith
#53. We have cut the text, but what remains are Shakespeare's words.
Edward Hall
#54. To a recognizably Christian culture, like Shakespeare's, Jesus Christ is the Logos incarnate, the Word made flesh. He exemplifies the good of having a body. In the long run, that is why Aquinas could baptize Aristotle and why the West could produce Shakespeare and Michelangelo.
William Shakespeare
#55. All of Shakespeare's plays were written under this law of censorship, which is why they are set in the past or in foreign countries, separated from the hot topics of Elizabethan and Jacobean England by the dramatic distance of time or space.
William Shakespeare
#56. It was Shakespeare's notion that on this day birds begin to couple; hence probably arose the custom of sending fancy love-billets.
Washington Irving
#57. It's what Shakespeare's mission was - to illuminate our thoughts and struggles and bring about the possibility of getting the most we can out of a day as opposed to least in this brief moment we're here.
Mandy Patinkin
#58. To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeare's mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves nature's active part.
William Carlos Williams
#59. I went to drama school. I'm classically trained; I studied Shakespeare, blah blah blah. But I always preferred to do Oscar Wilde, or Shakespeare's comedies over his dramas.
Elizabeth Banks
#61. Writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was a fun exercise in mixing just the right amount of the Bard with just the right amount of everyone's favorite galaxy far, far away.
Ian Doescher
#62. Shakespeare's Iago could be played as a soul in hell, driven, dark and desperate, willing to do anything, willing to use anyone, in order to escape from that hell.
Laura Lee Guhrke
#63. 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
#64. All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures - an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.
Mark Twain
#65. Learning (Shakespeare's plays) ... in school was a bit of a bore.
Al Pacino
#66. Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#67. Shakespeare's work is like a good song: you never really forget the main lines.
Michelle Dockery
#68. Why people fall in love has been debated since before Shakespeare's sonnets.
Joe Bruno
#69. 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
#70. The thing I'd really like to see is the old London Bridge, with all the old buildings around it like Shakespeare's Globe. I'd like to walk along that. Don't worry, I won't get drunk and fall in.
Alan Davies
#71. It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.
David Crystal
#72. A popular speaker, however unpopular and insignificant, has only to wind up his speech with half-a-dozen lines of Shakespeare (and to make it clearly understood that they are Shakespeare's) and he will sit down amid thunders of applause.
W.S. Gilbert
#73. 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
#74. There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare's.
Al Pacino
#75. In Shakespeare's play As You Like It, Touchstone says to Audrey in the Forest of Arden "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." (Act V, Scene I).
Karolina Achirri
#76. I started in theatre. I was at Cleveland and I went to London for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.
James Cromwell
#77. Mobile phones would have wrecked the plots of most of Shakespeare's plays.
Jackie French
#78. 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
#79. I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
Rita Dove
#80. The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#81. To paraphrase Shakespeare's Polonius, you sometimes have to get your hands a little dirty to set things straight.
Lynn Steward
#82. Shakespeare's plays are more violent than 'Scarface.'
Al Pacino
#83. My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.
Steven Moffat
#84. 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
#85. In 1580, when William was sixteen, Campion passed through Warwickshire on his way to the more safely Catholic north. He stayed with a distant relative of Shakespeare's, Sir William Catesby, whose son Robert would later be a ringleader of the Gunpowder Plot.
Bill Bryson
#86. An extraordinary and controversial interpretation of Shakespeare's origins, which certainly provokes much thought. A radical analysis of Shakespeare's text, leading to a conclusion which is bound to amaze the reader and the scholar. Who was Shakespeare?
Steven Berkoff
#87. 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
#88. A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.
Carol Zaleski
#89. To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters.
Ernst F. Schumacher
#90. 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
#91. When we are born, we cry that we are to come to this great stage of fools,' I quoted from Shakespeare's King Lear.
Brittainy C. Cherry
#92. When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.
Thom Gunn
#93. I considered several names, but Titania, a character from Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream', was best able to portray the image I wanted for what is a fantastically elegant and sexy yacht.
John Caudwell
#94. T. Ray said 'Who do you think you are? Julias Shakespeare?' The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare's first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival.
Sue Monk Kidd
#95. The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentations of 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study.
Peter Ackroyd
#96. American radio is the reverse of the Shakespearean stage. In Shakespeare's time the world's greatest dramas were acted with the most primitive technical arrangements; on the American air the world's most primitive writing is performed under perfect technical conditions.
George Mikes
#97. In writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars,' I had the freedom to go beyond the original script and add asides, soliloquys and even new scenes. The main characters all get a soliloquy or two - or in Luke's case, several.
Ian Doescher
#98. I didn't point out that I'm part Chinese-American and so the odds that I would have been in England back in Shakespeare's time were highly unlikely. "And,
Ally Condie
#100. Shakespeare is the outstanding example of how that can be done. In all of Shakespeare's plays, no matter what tragic events occur, no matter what rises and falls, we return to stability in the end.
Charlton Heston
