Shakespeare Quotes

O ill-starred wench! Pale as your smock!

The English language [during the Elizabethan era] wasn't standardized. There were no official dictionaries. There was no cultural belief that words should always be spelled the same way. So people spelled things however they heard them or however made sense. I mean the name Shakespeare had something like 16 different spellings, and the way he spelled it isn't the way we spell it.- School of Night - pg 44

I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet…. I’m an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.

And nothing is, but what is not.

You gotta be cruel to be kind.

The curse of true love never did run smooth.

THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD!!!!

Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dog And little mouse, every unworthy thing, Live here in heaven and may look on her, But Romeo may not.

I have never thought that the man of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.

Weigh oath with oath, and you will nothing weigh,Your vows to her and me, put in two scales,Will even weigh, and both as light as tales.

Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,— For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

By my soul I swear, there is no power in the tongue of man to alter me.

He is indeed the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.

This place looks like the last scene in Hamlet.

In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

I'll find a day to massacre them allAnd raze their faction and their family,The cruel father and his traitorous sons,To whom I sued for my dear son's life,And make them know what 'tis to let a queenKneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.

Imagine the same scene in HAMLET if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudius. We are all told Claudius will die by drinking the cup. Then Claudius dies choking on a chicken bone at lunch. Then the Queen dies when Horatio shows her the magical Mirror of Death. This mirror appears in no previous scene, nor is it explained why it exists. Then Ophelia summons up the Ghost from Act One and kills it, while she makes a speech denouncing the evils of religion. Ophelia and Hamlet are parted, as it is revealed in the last act that a curse will befall them if they do not part ways.

The time approachesThat will with due decision make us knowWhat we shall say we have and what we owe.Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate,But certain issue strokes must arbitrate;Towards which, advance th

Very few of us relate to what it's like to be a hero. But everyone understands what it's like to fail.

Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die,Take him and cut him out in little stars,And he will make the face of heaven so fineThat all the world will be in love with nightAnd pay no worship to the garish sun.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.

History doesn’t start with a tall buildingand a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is takingus for suckers and is playing a mean game.

We number nothing that we spend for you;Our duty is so rich, so infinite,That we may do it still without accompt.Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,That we, like savages, may worship it.

Life... is a paradise to what we fear of death.

Indeed, it may most verily be saidThat only death and taxes certain are.

- Be thou not technical with me,/Or else thine input valve may swift receive/a hearty helping of my golden foot.

I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itselfAnd falls on the other.

That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t' unloose; smooth every passionThat in the natures of their lords rebel,Being oil to the fire, snow to the colder moods,Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaksWith every gale and vary of their mastersKnowing naught, like dogs, but following.

O! Learn to read what silent love hath writ:to hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

Friar Laurence:O, mickle is the powerful grace that liesIn herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities: For nought to vile that on the earth doth live, But to the earth some special good doth give; nor aught so good, but, strain'd from that fair use, Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse: Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime's by action dignified.

Alack, when once our grace we have forgot,Nothing goes right; we would and we would not.

Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

Ambition should be made from sterner stuff.

One reason current discussions of justice are so impoverished is that our heterogeneous society does not have many shared texts. Shakespeare's plays are among the few secular texts that remain common enough and complex enough to sustain these conversation. His answers to our dilemmas may not "bear on all points." Yet they teach us not to underestimate the action of the flower.

Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.

Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.

Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales.

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.

After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits his goods and places his life at the Doge’s mercy. […] Shakespeare, it seems to me, was willing to introduce what is an absurd implausibility for the sake of an effect which he could not secure without it: at the last moment when, through his conduct, Shylock has destroyed any sympathy we may have felt for him earlier, we are reminded that, irrespective of his personal character, his status is one of inferiority. A Jew is not regarded, even in law, as a brother.

And it's what you never will write," said the Controller. "Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn't possibly be like Othello.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

(...)we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.

If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.

We've been told that with regard to seduction, "candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker," but in truth, rather, properly selected: "candy makes randy; liquor makes desire flicker"; or, as Shakespeare's porter said to Macduff: "[drink] provokes the desire but it takes away the performance." The wines and beers of antiquity, however, which were potent infusions of innumerable psychoactive plants, often requiring dilution with water and in which alcohol served rather as preservative then inebriating active principle.

If the distinction is not held too rigidly nor pressed too far, it is interesting to think of Shakespeare's chief works as either love dramas or power dramas, or a combination of the two. In his Histories, the poet handles the power problem primarily, the love interest being decidedly incidental. In the Comedies, it is the other way around, overwhelmingly in the lighter ones, distinctly in the graver ones, except in Troilus and Cressida--hardly comedy at all--where without full integration something like a balance is maintained. In the Tragedies both interests are important, but Othello is decidedly a love drama and Macbeth as clearly a power drama, while in Hamlet and King Lear the two interests often alternate rather than blend.

Mother, I will look to like. If looking liking moves.

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause

It is something to have gazed on the constellated white, felt it running from the eyes and the pores: the salt of love. It is something to have whispered wild thank-yous in the only ways we know how.

Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.

To be, or not to be: what a question!

Get you gone, you dwarf,You minimus of hindering knotgrass made,You bead, you acorn!

It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.

That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare.

Weaving spiders, come not here, Hence, you long legged spinners, hence! Beetles black, approach not here, worm nor snail, do no offense.

How we lavish our money and worship on Shakespeare without in the least knowing why!

Impressive, most impressive, worthy lad,Thine Obi-Wan hath taught thee well, and thouHast master'd all thy fears. Now, go! ReleaseThine anger, for thy hate alone can strikeMe down!

The rest is silence.

The longer I lived, the longer it would be until I saw him alive again, until I could taste his new lips and run my fingers through his new hair. We could be young and beautiful again . . .

You tell me the dead are coming through a crack in my barn, but I shouldn’t worry?