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Quotes about William Shakespeare
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A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.
George Edward Woodberry
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I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats
Irving Layton
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There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Based on quote from Shakespeare, Twelfth Night Act II, scene v: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.
Joseph Heller
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The audience laughed a bit too hard, wanting to show appreciation for someone who enchants without guile. By simple definition, a hero is someone we can admire without apology. Heroes don't sell out with kiss-and-tell memoirs, docudramas, or exercise videos. They are, as Shakespeare wrote, "the observed of all observers".
Kitty Kelley
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If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.
Anthony Burgess
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The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
Robert Browning
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The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good — in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
Robert Graves
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Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.
Lloyd Alexander
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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
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Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.
William S. Burroughs
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If I had any doubts at all about the justice of my dislike for Shakespeare, that doubt vanished completely. What a crude, immoral,vulgar, and senseless work Hamlet is. The whole thing is based on pagan vengeance; the only aim is to gather together as many effects as possible; there is no rhyme or reason about it.
Leo Tolstoy
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If we claim heritage in Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, we also acknowledge that it was for liberties guaranteed Englishmen by sacred charters our fathers triumphantly fought. While wisely rejecting throne and caste and privilege and an Established Church in their new-born state, they adopted the substance of English liberty and the body of English law.
Chauncey Depew
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I had now the key to all language, and I was eager to learn to use it. Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.
Helen Keller
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Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.
Lytton Strachey
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Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.
Seth Lloyd
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Nowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such a pain, such and such a greenish-yellow colour, such and such a temperature, such and such a sound, etc., make up the only reality there is. All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.
Victor Hugo
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
Alan Lightman
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If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.
R. G. Collingwood
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It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare.
Albert Camus
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I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts-a grace before Milton-a grace before Shakespeare-a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading The Fairie Queene?
Charles Lamb
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Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
William Shakespeare
Creative Commons
Born:
April 26, 1564
Died:
April 23, 1616
(aged 51)
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