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When you do Shakespeare they think you must be intelligent because they think you understand what you're saying.
Helen Mirren
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Television is to news as a bumper sticker is to Shakespeare. I remember hearing an analogy once that went something like that. Your typical nightly, 35-minute TV news broadcast is a headline service with pictures. Five minutes of police-blotter reporting - fires, murders, car accidents, etc. - five minutes of human-interest stories and small talk, five minutes of weather, five minutes of sports, ten minutes of commercials, and maybe a minute or two for business, science, politics, and affairs of the world.
Mike Rosen
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Outside Shakespeare the word treason to me means nothing. Only, you pissed in our soup and we drank it.
Coral Browne to Guy Burgess
Alan Bennett
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Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare.
George Saintsbury
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For though he had very little Latin beyond 'Cave canem,' he had, as a young dog, devoured Shakespeare (in a tasty leather binding).
Dodie Smith
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The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament, especially the book of Job, the Psalms, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. … In writing English the most important quality that you can acquire is style. It makes all the difference to anyone who reads what you write, whether you use the best phrases in the best way.
Aleister Crowley
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It is strongly suspected that a NEWTON or SHAKESPEARE excels other mortals only by a more ample development of the anterior cerebral lobes, by having an extra inch of brain in the right place.
Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet
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The truth of what I have so often inculcated, that it is the "steady, painstaking, likely-to-do-good" man who in the long run wins the race against those who now and then give a brilliant flash and, as Shakespeare says, "straight are cold again".
Charles Dodgson (archdeacon)
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Shakespeare wouldn't have been any good if he'd stayed in Stratford. He had to go to London to be bathed in the full current of the Renaissance.
John Dos Passos
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But what if Shakespeare― and Hamlet― were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?
Gayle Forman
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Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's,
Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee,
Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walked along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse.
Walter Savage Landor
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We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us—they watch from their graves!
Robert Browning
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We completely ignore the human value of the information. A selection of 100 letters is given a certain information value, and we do not investigate whether it makes sense in English, and, if so, whether the meaning of the sentence is of any practical importance. According to our definition, a set of 100 letters selected at random (according to the rules of Table 1.1), a sentence of 100 letters from a newspaper, a piece of Shakespeare or a theorem of Einstein are given exactly the same informational value.
Léon Brillouin
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In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible Knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.
William Wordsworth
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In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, act V, scene 1, we find this exchange between the two young lovers: JESSICA: I am never merry when I hear sweet music
LORENZO: The reason is, your spirits are attentive The opening of the finale of Beethoven' s 'Emperor' Concerto provides a splendid example of the kind of theme that is the inspiration for this book. A completely unified theme that hangs together beautifully, it nevertheless portrays vividly a series of contrasting sentiments in a succession that amounts to a small narrative...
Charles Rosen
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Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.
Charles Lamb
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After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?
Dejan Stojanovic
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Handel and Shakespeare have left us the best that any have left us; yet, in spite of this, how much of their lives was wasted.
Samuel Butler (novelist)
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Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
Martin Amis
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Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time. They would have been excited. What richness! They would have plundered this new science for their imagery.
Ian McEwan
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The peak of my school experience of Shakespeare came in my senior matriculation year; the set play was "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and it was taught by a solemn donkey who understood nothing but the political organization of fairyland. I well remember him dictating a long note which began, "The fairies live in fairyland full stop. They have a king comma and a queen."
Robertson Davies
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By this time I had discovered that all the gamey bits were cut out of the school texts, because I had a Shakespeare of my own; the Ontario Department of Education was hard at its impossible task of trying to educate the masses without in any permanent way inflaming their minds.
Robertson Davies
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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?
C. P. Snow
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Shakespeare's stage must hold the glass to every age.
Francis Turner Palgrave
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Even when the problem of the access to technology is solved so that anyone who wishes can have access to technology, there still remains a problem. For example, just about anyone has access to a public library (at least in America). In that library we find the greatest, most profound, most illuminating literature that human beings have so far produced. Do most people read these books? Have you read Cervantes? Have you read the sonnets of Shakespeare? Have you read Hegel or Nietzsche? Their books are in the library, you have access to them, why have you not familiarized yourself with this literature? (Even if you have, I think you will agree that most people have not. Why?)
Neil Postman
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
William Shakespeare
Creative Commons
Born:
April 26, 1564
Died:
April 23, 1616
(aged 51)
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