William Shakespeare Quotes

3,205 Sourced Quotes

I never knew so young a body with so old a head.

William Shakespeare
He hath a heart as sound as a bell, and his tongue is the clapper; for what his heart thinks his tongue speaks.

William Shakespeare
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty.

William Shakespeare
Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy: mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men.

William Shakespeare
'Tis strange that death should sing.
I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death.

William Shakespeare
When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

William Shakespeare
O! what authority and show of truth
Can cunning sin cover itself withal.

William Shakespeare
…Wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?
I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen'
Stuck in my throat.

William Shakespeare
Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.

William Shakespeare
O sun!
Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in; darkling stand
The varying shore o' the world.

William Shakespeare
Is the chair empty? is the sword unsway'd?
Is the king dead? the empire unpossess'd?

William Shakespeare
This place is too cold for hell. I'll devil-porter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.

William Shakespeare
Fall Greeks; fail fame; honour or go or stay; My major vow lies here, this I'll obey.

William Shakespeare
My grief lies all within,
And these external manners of lament
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul.

William Shakespeare
Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.

William Shakespeare
Alas, sir, how fell you besides your five wits?" Malvolio: "Fool, there was never a man so notoriously abused. I am as well in my wits, fool, as thou art." Feste: "But as well? Then you are mad indeed, if you be no better in you wits than a fool.

William Shakespeare
My comfort is, that old age, that ill layer-up of beauty, can do no more spoil upon my face.

William Shakespeare
If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide, By self-example mayst thou be denied.

William Shakespeare
Hamlet: His beard was grizzled, no?
Horatio: It was, as I have seen it in his life,
A sable silver'd.

William Shakespeare
My nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

William Shakespeare
O Helena, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine! To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne? Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!

William Shakespeare
Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies
A lass unparalleled.

William Shakespeare
Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade To shepherds, looking on their silly sheep, Than doth a rich embroider'd canopy To kings that fear their subjects treachery?

William Shakespeare
Good-night, good-night! parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.

William Shakespeare
A surfeit of the sweetest things
the deepest loathing to the stomach brings.

William Shakespeare