Quotes about William Shakespeare

451 Sourced Quotes

The Baroness was like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare all rolled into one and perhaps she was the most influential person to me in the early part of my life.

Berenice Abbott

We don't all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even 'Little Red Riding Hood.' The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

The whole concept of the avant-garde in art is meaningless. I can see what it means when applied to sport, for instance. But to apply it to art would be to accept the idea of progress in art; and though progress has an obvious place in technology — more perfect machines, capable of carrying out their functions better and more accurately — how can anyone be more advanced in art? How could Thomas Mann be said to be better than Shakespeare?

Andrei Tarkovsky

There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb
The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime
With tears and laughter for all time!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-y-pointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Considered as a whole, Hesse's achievement can hardly be matched in modern literature; it is the continually rising trajectory of an idea, the fundamentally religious idea of how to 'live more abundantly'. Hesse has little imagination in the sense that Shakespeare or Tolstoy can be said to have imagination, but his ideas have a vitality that more than makes up for it. Before all, he is a novelist who used the novel to explore the problem: What should we do with our lives? The man who is interested to know how he should live instead of merely taking life as it comes, is automatically an Outsider.

Golf is not just exercise; it is an adventure, a romance. Anything can happen, however unexpected, unlikely, bizarre or close to impossible. The game is full of surprises, turns and twists. It is like a Shakespeare play in which disaster and comedy are intertwined.

Harold A. Segall

Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me.

Our myriad-minded Shakespeare.

Footnote: Ανηρ μυριονους [Anir myrionous], a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the child of that great movement, and marks its height as it penetrated the North with civilization.

George Edward Woodberry

Shakespeare is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other.

Shakespeare (whom you and ev'ry play-house bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.

This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the graver had a strife
With Nature, to out-do the life:
O could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass, as he has hit
His face; the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass:
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture, but his book.

On the portrait of shakespeare

Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.

About my English... I learned more from listening to Hank Williams of Johnny Cash... than from reading Shakespeare.

Chaucer was a class traitor
Shakespeare hated the mob
Donne sold out a bit later
Sidney was a nob.

The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It's just that they don't love me back.

David Nicholls (writer)

To compare the patronizing pedantry of A Course in Miracles with any line or two from the New Testament gospels is like comparing a washing machine repair manual with Shakespeare.

Robert M. Price

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare — or, if not, it's some equally brainy bird — who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping. And what I'm driving at is that the man is perfectly right.

P. G. Wodehouse

Shakespeare is so tiring. You never get a chance to sit down unless you're a king.

George S. Kaufman

Shakespeare without Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet would be all too much like Hamlet without the prince.

Brand Blanshard

Against the wall, near the head of the bunk, was a rack filled with books. I glanced over them, noting with astonishment such names as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe, and De Quincey. There were scientific works too, among which were represented men such as Tyndall, Proctor, and Darwin.

I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.

Tallulah Bankhead

At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

The important thing is to get yourself born. You're entitled to that. But you're not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen.

Anthony Burgess

I never really thought about how when I look at the moon it's the same moon as Shakespeare and Marie Antoinette and George Washington and Cleopatra looked at.

Susan Beth Pfeffer

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

P. G. Wodehouse

I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me.

She killed Lorena in a fight?" Eric's grin grew even broader. He was as proud as if he'd heard his firstborn reciting Shakespeare.

Charlaine Harris