Quotes about William Shakespeare

451 Sourced Quotes

You're just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they're already in us. That's why we pretend them in the first place.

Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield.

Tennessee Williams

For thof ye had as wise a snout on
As Shakespeare or Sir Isaac Newton,
Your judgement fouk woud hae a doubt on,
I'll tak my aith,
Till they could see ye wi' a suit on
O' gude Braid Claith.

Robert Fergusson

King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare — or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory — and very few eyes can see the mystery of life — a life like the Scriptures, figurative... Lord Byron cuts a figure, but he is not figurative. Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it.

Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't.

William Faulkner

But in my homeboys' high school, it's not like that. They don't have trips to go see this Broadway play, they don't read things we read. They didn't know when I was like: "Yo, Shakespeare's dope."

The sphinx atropos squeakes when hurt, nearly as loud as a mouse, which, when uttered in the most plaintive tone, naturally shocks the human heart, and makes it shudder at the thought of destroying inoffensive animals merely for the sake of curiosity. I cannot help reflecting on this tyranny, this wanton cruelty, exercised by thoughtless man, on many animals but especially in insects: 'tis certain, that every animal possessing life, has feeling; and, therefore, is as capable of suffering pain, as of enjoying pleasure; and, as Shakespeare humanely expresses The poor beetle crushed beneath the foot, feels the pangs of death as great as when a monarch falls. Gentle reader, pardon this digression, my feelings commanded my pen.

Yet what representative trio do not make a mad trio? Blake, Mrs. Aphra Behn, Zeno - not a typical but a representative threesome... Things do not go in simple pairs. Poetry is not a case of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bridges and Masefield, Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot. Poetry is some awkward trio - like Caedmon, Oliver Goldsmith, Enda St. Vincent Millay. So with the novel.

Shakespeare is usually apt... but not always quotable in mixed company.

It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes.

Stephanie Zacharek

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.

John Dunning (writer)

I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric...

They would talk of nothing but high life, and high-lived company, with other fashionable topics, such as pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses.

Oliver Goldsmith

He [Shakespeare] was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.

Shakespeare is like mashed potatoes, you can never get enough of him.

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

William Wordsworth

I believe that the luxuriance of Shakespeare's dramatic instinct largely dominates that outburst of lyric melody which gives the Sonnets their life.

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.

Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of Shakespeare he wasn't really an authority. Neither the Advocate-Times, the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion.

I would like to do Shakespeare's only unknown piece, That's the Way I Lick It... It's a bleak night my Lord. Look! The moon like a testicle hangs low in the sky. This bodes not well.... Anon, post-haste, let's get a larger crowd in here. Free Cocaine! There's no luck. Does anyone have drugs to ease my pain? My Kingdom for a Quaalude! … It is the end! I must go, for I cannot come here, and yet, it has been brief, 'tis over, and the lights do turn bright. I'm melting! Help me! Help me!

The thing that is always so surprising about plays written in another century is how remarkably elastic they are. When you listen to the way in which Shakespeare attacks relationships, for example, even though the words may start off sounding foreign, in actuality they are so accessible, the motivations so clear, the resonances so contemporary. When you put it in a modern context - we could well be in a place with someone like Gaddafi or Mubarak - it becomes apparent how Richard III resonates with that type of personality, with media and manipulation, alliances and petty jealousies.

If Watson and Crick had not discovered the nature of DNA, one can be virtually certain that other scientists would eventually have determined it. With art—whether painting, music or literature—it is quite different. If Shakespeare had not written Hamlet, no other playwright would have done so.

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked and the map a bad example
With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal —
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Stephen Spender

Yes, Shakespeare foremost and forever (Darwin too). But also teach about the excellence of pygmy bushcraft and Fuegian survival in the world's harshest climate. Dignity and inspiration come in many guises. Would anyone choose the tinhorn patriotism of George Armstrong Custer over the eloquence of Chief Joseph in defeat?

Stephen Jay Gould

Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh
To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lie
A little nearer Spenser, to make more room
For Shakespeare, in your threefold, fourfold tomb.

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

English is a language of mass destruction. Lady Macbeth is a queen of mass destruction. Lear is a king of mass destruction. Hamlet is a prince of mass destruction. Shakespeare is a bard of mass destruction. And Moby Dick is a whale of mass destruction. Why are you a culture of death and destruction? Why do you obliterate villages, cities, and civilizations with your language of mass destruction? Is the destruction worth the destruction? For what purpose did you destroy my language? To impose the sovereignty of your rule of law with weapons of mass destruction—to then say: —I offer you my lifesaver. Now, we can communicate in the same language. English only, please.

Giannina Braschi

Coarse
jocosity
catches the crowd
shakespeare
and I
are often
low browed.

I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's work) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.

Vladimir Nabokov