Illustrated Shakespeare Quotes

I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than Socrates? Was he more patient, more charitable, than Epictetus? Was he a greater philosopher, a deeper thinker, than Epicurus? In what respect was he the superior of Zoroaster? Was he gentler than Lao-tsze, more universal than Confucius? Were his ideas of human rights and duties superior to those of Zeno? Did he express grander truths than Cicero? Was his mind subtler than Spinoza’s? Was his brain equal to Kepler’s or Newton’s? Was he grander in death – a sublimer martyr than Bruno? Was he in intelligence, in the force and beauty of expression, in breadth and scope of thought, in wealth of illustration, in aptness of comparison, in knowledge of the human brain and heart, of all passions, hopes and fears, the equal of Shakespeare, the greatest of the human race?

Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; So ere you find where light in darkness lies, Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.

The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.

So excellent a king; that was, to this, Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly.

I rather would entreat thy company, To see the wonders of the world abroad, Than (living dully sluggardiz’d at home) Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.

Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation Prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king And queen moult no feather. I have of late--but Wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all Custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily With my disposition that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most Excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave O'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted With golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to Me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how Express and admirable! in action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the World! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, What is this quintessence of dust? man delights not Me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling You seem to say so.

And now, these books. This. He touched PHYSIOGNOMONIE. The secrets of the individual's character as found on his face. Were Jim and Will, then, featured all angelic, pure, half-innocent, peering up through the sidewalk at marching terror? Did the boys represent the ideal for your Woman, Man, or Child of Excellent Bearing, Color, Balance, and Summer Disposition? Converserly...Charles Halloway turned a page...did the scurrying freaks, the Illustrated Marvel, bear the foreheads of the Irascible, the Cruel, the Covetous, the mouths of the Lewd and Untruthful? the teeth of the Crafty, the Unstable, the Audacious, the Vainglorious, and your Marvelous Beast? No. The book slipped shut. If faces were judged, the freaks were no worse than many he'd been slipping from the liberty late nights in his long career. There was only one thing sure. Two lines of Shakespeare said it. He should write them in the middle of the clock of books, to fix the heart of his apprehension: By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. So vague yet so immense. He did not want to live with it. Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it for all the rest of his life. At the window he looked out and thought Jim, Will, are you coming? will you get here? Waiting, his flesh took paleness from his bones.

If I be drunk, I’ll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves.

I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love out of poetry and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays?

O, that a man might know The end of this day's business ere it come! But it sufficeth that the day will end, And then the end is known.

For where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?

21. Take in a great breath of air and then blow it out. Contained in that single breath were at least three nitrogen atoms that were breathed by every human being who ever lived, including Jesus Christ, William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, and every president of the United States. This illustrates the fact that everything we do affects other people, positively or negatively. That’s why it is foolish to say, “Do your own thing if it doesn’t hurt anybody else.” Everything we do affects other people.

My course of study was philosophy. I remembered that it was my uncle, […] who, without invoking a single proper name, had first revealed to me philosophy’s beautiful perplexities. One of the after-dinner oranges was his aid in initiating me into Berkeley’s idealism; a chessboard was enough to illustrate the paradoxes of the Eleatics. Years later, he was to lend me Hinton’s treatises which attempt to demonstrate the reality of four-dimensional space and which the reader is meant to imagine by means of complicated exercises with mutlicoloured cubes.

N MY early boyhood I was enraptured by the great fairytale illustrators of the period: Arthur Rackham, Edmond Dulac, Kay Nielsen. As a schoolboy, I was to discover Aubrey Beardsley, and I was extremely fond of an edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream with most imaginative drawings by Heath Robinson,

The danger that lies in the repression of the imagination may be well illustrated from the play of "Macbeth." The imagination of the hero (in him a powerful faculty), representing how the deed would appear to others, and so representing its true nature to himself, was his great impediment on the path to crime.

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death The memory be green, and that it us befitted To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom To be contracted in one brow of woe, Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature That we with wisest sorrow think on him Together with remembrance of ourselves. Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, Th' imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we—as ’twere with a defeated joy, With an auspicious and a dropping eye, With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole— Taken to wife. Nor have we herein barred Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone With this affair along. For all, our thanks.

Like it!” I exclaimed. “It is lovely — wonderful! It is worthy to rank with the finest Italian masterpieces.” “Oh, no!” remonstrated Zara; “no, indeed! When the great Italian sculptors lived and worked — ah! one may say with the Scriptures, ‘There were giants in those days.’ Giants — veritable ones; and we modernists are the pigmies. We can only see Art now through the eyes of others who came before us. We cannot create anything new. We look at painting through Raphael; sculpture through Angelo; poetry through Shakespeare; philosophy through Plato. It is all done for us; we are copyists. The world is getting old — how glorious to have lived when it was young! But nowadays the very children are blase.

I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time Into this breathing world scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;-- Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun, And descant on mine own deformity: And therefore,--since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days,-- I am determined to prove a villain,

Albert Einstein, considered the most influential person of the 20th century, was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read. His parents thought he was retarded. He spoke haltingly until age nine. He was advised by a teacher to drop out of grade school: “You’ll never amount to anything, Einstein.” Isaac Newton, the scientist who invented modern-day physics, did poorly in math. Patricia Polacco, a prolific children’s author and illustrator, didn’t learn to read until she was 14. Henry Ford, who developed the famous Model-T car and started Ford Motor Company, barely made it through high school. Lucille Ball, famous comedian and star of I Love Lucy, was once dismissed from drama school for being too quiet and shy. Pablo Picasso, one of the great artists of all time, was pulled out of school at age 10 because he was doing so poorly. A tutor hired by Pablo’s father gave up on Pablo. Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the world’s great composers. His music teacher once said of him, “As a composer, he is hopeless.” Wernher von Braun, the world-renowned mathematician, flunked ninth-grade algebra. Agatha Christie, the world’s best-known mystery writer and all-time bestselling author other than William Shakespeare of any genre, struggled to learn to read because of dyslexia. Winston Churchill, famous English prime minister, failed the sixth grade.

Tevershall! Era aquilo Tevershall! A idílica Inglaterra! A Inglaterra de Shakespeare! Não, era a Inglaterra de hoje, como Connie percebera desde que tinha vindo viver para ali. Aquela Inglaterra estava a produzir uma nova raça humana, sobreconcentrada no dinheiro e nos aspetos sociais e políticos da vida, mas morta em termos espontâneos, intuitivos, morta! Todos eles meio cadáveres, dotados de uma terrível e insistente consciência na outra metade de si. Havia em tudo aquilo algo de sinistro e subterrâneo. Era um submundo. E bastante insondável. Como é possível entender as reações de meio cadáveres? Quando Connie viu os grandes camiões repletos de operários de siderurgia de Sheffield, uns seres esquisitos, de uma distorcida estatura baixa, que seguiam em excursão rumo a Matlock, sentiu as entranhas a desfalecer e pensou: Ah, meu Deus, o que é que o homem fez ao homem? O que estão os líderes dos homens a fazer aos seus semelhantes? Reduziram-nos a menos do que a expressão mais simples da humanidade, a fraternidade deixou de ser possível! É um pesadelo.

Listen to the part of you that is made of the same stuff as stars, the same stuff as Shakespeare. That part knows for sure that you are special, that your life has a purpose greater than anything you can imagine. That's the part worth listening to.

Some people can stick to one type of writing and be perfectly happy. I’m not one of them. Once I knew that, and once I stopped trying to pigeonhole myself for the sake of a career and originality and beating Georg Büchner, I didn’t suffer any significant writer’s block again. The lesson I take from that experience is that the way to beat writer’s block is to get to know yourself better as a writer, and once you know yourself, accept yourself. You’re not Shakespeare or Joyce or Gertrude Stein or Theodore Sturgeon or Joseph Mitchell or Tillie Olsen or Fran Lebowitz or James Redfield. For better or worse, you’re you.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time s waste: Then can I drown an eye (unus’d to flow) For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night. And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe, And moan th’ expense of many a vanish’d sight: Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan. Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee (dear friend) All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end. —William Shakespeare, “Sonnet XXX,” Art & Love. An Illustrated Anthology of Love Poetry, edited by Kate Farrell (Bulfinch, 1990)

A young man married is a man that’s marred.’ That’s a golden rule, Arthur; take it to heart. Anne Hathaway, I have not a doubt, suggested it; experience is the sole abestos, only unluckily one seldom gets it before one’s hands are burnt irrevocably. Shakespeare took to wife the ignorant, rosy-cheeked, Warwickshire peasant girl, at eighteen! Poor fellow! I picture him, with all his untried powers, struggling like new-born Hercules for strength and utterance, and the great germ of poetry within him, tinging all the common realities of life with its rose hue; genius giving him power to see with God-like vision, the ‘fairies nestling in the cowslip chalices,’ and the golden gleam of Cleopatra’s sails; to feel the ‘spiced Indian air’ by night, and the wild working of kings’ ambitious lust; to know by intuition, alike the voices of nature unheard by common ears, and the fierce schemes and passions of a world from which social position shut him out!

Politicians have great skill in activating this system and easily persuade large crowds to behave like small children having temper tantrums. The favorite activating device (dramatized by Shakespeare in Henry V) invokes mammalian pack-solidarity by attacking a rival pack. George Bush, perceived as a "wimp" by many, raised his popularity to unprecedented heights, just as I looked about for a contemporary illustration of this point. Mr. Bush simply invaded a small, Third World country (Panama) where a quick, easy victory came within a week. The "wimp" image vanished overnight. Any alpha male in any gorilla or chimpanzee pack, feeling his authority slipping, would have followed the same course.

Meanwhile, my willingness to admit that somebody writing in a language I don’t know may have surpassed Shakespeare does not compel me to rush in haste to join Prof. Taylor and the School of Resentment (as Bloom calls them) in their effort to promote any writer over Shakespeare if that writer happens to lack white skin and male genitalia. Such a nonwhite female super-genius may exist, I stipulate; but I will not assume her existence until I discover her works and personally find them superior. Meanwhile, I think the attempt to dump Shakespeare because of his skin-color and gender illustrates the kind of blatant racism and sexism that once marked “the ragged and the golden rabble”; and I do not see why such racism and sexism, reversed but still foolish, have become the Dogma of our totally-indoctrinated and half-educated neo-Left Wing.

Adriana had so well profited by the good counsel of her mother-in-law, that she never after cherished unjust suspicions, or was jealous of her husband.[Pg 189]

IT BEGINS TO DAWN ON YOU. THAT EVERYTHING YOU JUST DID. MAY HAVE BEEN A COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME. IT ALSO BEGINS TO DAWN ON YOU. THAT I WAS THE ONE ALL ALONG. WHO ILLUSTRATED THIS FANTASTIC CARTOON RECTANGLE. WHICH YOU REMEMBER THAT YOU SAW BEFORE SOMEWHERE. AND YOU NOW FIND THIS REVELATION TO BE. ALMOST AS RETROACTIVELY PLAUSIBLE. AS IT IS MIND BLOWING. IT BRINGS TO MIND A FAMOUS QUOTE. FROM A CELEBRATED POET OF YORE. THAT I THINK GOES LIKE THIS. "WELL SHIT. THAT'S A HELL OF A MYSTERY. NO ONE THOUGHT WAS A MYSTERY. AND DIDN'T EVEN REALLY NEED SOLVING. BUT DAMN IF IT DIDN'T JUST GET SOLVED. SO NICE WORK." - CHERUB SHAKESPEARE, PROBABLY.

scenes from the Legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table many lovely pictures have been painted, showing much diversity of figures and surroundings, some being definitely sixth-century British or Saxon, as in Blair Leighton’s fine painting of the dead Elaine; others—for example, Watts’ Sir Galahad—show knight and charger in fifteenth-century armour; while the warriors of Burne Jones wear strangely impracticable armour of some mystic period. Each of these painters was free to follow his own conception, putting the figures into whatever period most appealed to his imagination; for he was not illustrating the actual tales written by Sir Thomas Malory, otherwise he would have found himself face to face with a difficulty. King Arthur and his knights fought, endured, and toiled in the sixth century, when the Saxons were overrunning Britain; but their achievements were not chronicled by Sir Thomas Malory until late in the fifteenth century. Sir Thomas, as Froissart has done before him, described the habits of life, the dresses, weapons, and armour that his own eyes looked upon in the every-day scenes about him, regardless of the fact that almost every detail mentioned was something like a thousand years too late. Had Malory undertaken an account of the landing of Julius Caesar he would, as a matter of course, have protected the Roman legions with bascinet or salade, breastplate, pauldron and palette, coudiére, taces and the rest, and have armed them with lance and shield, jewel-hilted sword and slim misericorde; while the Emperor himself might have been given the very suit of armour stripped from the Duke of Clarence before his fateful encounter with the butt of malmsey. Did not even Shakespeare calmly give cannon to the Romans and suppose every continental city to lie majestically beside the sea? By the old writers, accuracy in these matters was disregarded, and anachronisms were not so much tolerated as unperceived. In illustrating this edition of “The Legends of King Arthur and his Knights,” it has seemed best, and indeed unavoidable if the text and the pictures are to tally, to draw what Malory describes, to place the fashion

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste; Then can I drown an eye (unus’d to flow) For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe, And moan th’ expense of many a vanish’d sight; Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before: But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

The first is the belief that the universe is essentially harmonious, and that the source of that concord lies in mathematical proportions which can be directly related to musical harmonies. Pythagoras, in an oft-repeated legend, was said to have meditated on the sound of smiths beating hammers upon anvils, and to have argued that a hammer half as heavy produced a note an octave above its full-sized fellow.3 More important were the experiments with a single string, or monochord, attributed to him by his successors. If a stretched string is divided exactly into two it produces a sound an octave higher than the fundamental pitch (the ratio 2:1), the intervals of the fourth and fifth can similarly be expressed as the ratios 4:3 and 3:2 respectively, and all other intervals can be described in mathematical terms.4 These numerical proportions were then extended to describe the relationships of the planetary spheres, both in their relative distance one from another, and in the speed of their movement. The ideas were given influential (if obscure) expression in Plato’s Timaeus, and endlessly elaborated in succeeding centuries up to the Renaissance. One of the final manifestations of this understanding is provided in the illustration of cosmic harmony from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi … historia 1