Shakespeare Quotations Quotes

I remember the will said, 'May God thy gold refine.' That must be from the Bible." "Shakespeare," Turtle said. All quotations were either from the Bible or Shakespeare.

All quotations were either from the Bible or Shakespeare.

Tis well thou art not fish; if thou hadst, thou hadst been poor-John.

There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.

I bought you something" Willows blurts out. "You bought...What?" Willow closes her eyes for a second. She's a little surprised she's going to give it to him after all, but there's no going back now. She has to. "At the bookstore." She reaches into her bag again, and pushes the package across the table towards him. Guy takes the book out of the bag slowly, Willow waits for him to look disappointed, to look confused that she would buy him such a battered, old- "I love it when used books have notes in the margins, it's the best," Guy says as he flips through the pages. "I always imagine who read it before me." He pauses and looks at one of Prospero's speeches. "I have way too much homework to read this now, but you know what? Screw it. I want to know why it's your favorite Shakespeare. Thank you, that was really nice of you. I mean, you really didn't have to." "But I did anyway," Willow says so quietly she's not even sure hears her. Hey," Guy frowns for a second. "You didn't write anything in here." "Oh, I didn't even think...I, well, I wouldn't even know what to write," Willow says shyly. "Well, maybe you'll think of something later," he says. Willow watches Guy read the opening. There's no mistaking it. His smile is genuine, and she can't help thinking that if she can't make David look like this, at least she can do it for someone.

Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own.

God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man. In truth, I know it is a sin to be a mocker, but he! why, he hath a horse better than the Neapolitan’s, a better bad habit of frowning than the Count Palentine; he is every man in no man. If a throstle sing, he falls straight a-cap’ring. He will fence with his own shadow. If I should marry him, I should marry twenty husbands.

There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.

Ma la virilità si è tutta smammolata in coccolette; il coraggio svaporato in complimenti, e gli uomini sono diventati tutti lingua, come dei pappagalli ammaestrati. Oggi è più valente di un Ercole chi sa meglio mentire e spergiurare. Non posso diventare uomo di mia volontà, e allora morirò donna per disperazione.

Too poetical that about the sad. Music did that. Music hath charms Shakespeare said. Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be. Wisdom while you wait.

If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception—a clearly remarkable proportion.

Q (Quiller-Couch) was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to his students of writing at Cambridge. "Just what I need!" I congratulated myself. I hurried home with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag: Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed his students − including me − had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the "Invocation to Light" in Book 9. So I said, "Wait here," and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it and got to page 3, when I hit a snag: Milton assumed I'd read the Christian version of Isaiah and the New Testament and had learned all about Lucifer and the War in Heaven, and since I'd been reared in Judaism I hadn't. So I said, "Wait here," and borrowed a Christian Bible and read about Lucifer and so forth, and then went back to Milton and read Paradise Lost, and then finally got back to Q, page 3. On page 4 or 5, I discovered that the point of the sentence at the top of the page was in Latin and the long quotation at the bottom of the page was in Greek. So I advertised in the Saturday Review for somebody to teach me Latin and Greek, and went back to Q meanwhile, and discovered he assumed I not only knew all the plays by Shakespeare, and Boswell's Johnson, but also the Second books of Esdras, which is not in the Old Testament and not in the New Testament, it's in the Apocrypha, which is a set of books nobody had ever thought to tell me existed. So what with one thing and another and an average of three "Wait here's" a week, it took me eleven years to get through Q's five books of lectures.

When I was around 19 years old, working in the college library, I was talking to a friend of mine and this older woman interrupted and said "You're too young to know about Billie Holiday." My response was "I'm too young to know about Shakespeare, too ... should I not read him?

That was when Petra spoke up. "This is India, and you know the word. It's satyagraha, and it doesn't mean peaceful or passive resistance at all." "Not everyone here speaks Hindi," said a Tamil planner. "But everyone here should know Gandhi," said Petra. Sayagi agreed with her. "Satyagraha is something else. The willingness to endure great personal suffering in order to do what's right." "What's the difference, really?" "Sometimes," said Petra, "what's right is not peaceful or passive. What matters is that you do not hide from the consequences. You bear what must be borne." "That sounds more like courage than anything else," said the Tamil. "Courage to do right," said Sayagi. "Courage even when you can't win." "What happened to 'discretion is the better part of valor'?" "A quotation from a cowardly character in Shakespeare," someone else pointed out. "Not contradictory, anyway," said Sayagi. "Completely different circumstances. If there's a chance of victory later through withdrawal now, you keep your forces intact. But personally, as an individual, if you know that the price of doing right is terrible loss or suffering or even death, satyagraha means that you are all the more determined to do right, for fear that fear might make you unrighteous." "Oh, paradoxes within paradoxes." But Petra turned it from superficial philosophy to something else entirely. "I am trying," she said, "to achieve satyagraha.

Love has always been the chief business of my life, the only thing I have thought—no, felt—supremely worth while, and I don’t pretend that this experience was not succeeded by others. But at that time, I was innocent, with the innocence of ignorance, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was without consciousness, that is to say, more utterly absorbed than was ever possible again. For after that first time there was always part of me standing aside, comparing, analysing, objecting: ‘Is this real? Is this sincere?’ All the world of my predecessors was there before me, taking, as it were, the bread out of my mouth. Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own. As the blood dripped from the wound, there was always part of me to watch with a smile and a sneer: ‘Literature! Mere literature! Nothing to make a fuss about!’ And then I would add, ‘But so Mercutio jested as he died!

This conviction that life is a seeking without a finding, that its purpose is impenetrable, that joy and sorrow are alike meaningless, you will see written largely in the work of all great artists. It is obviously the final message, if any message is to be sought there at all, of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. It is the idea that broods over Wagner's Ring, as the divine wrath broods over the Old Testament. In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable obsession. What else is there in Turgenev, Dostoievski, Andrieff? Or in the Zola of L'Assommoir, Germinal, La Debacle, the whole Rougon-Macquart series?

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition. Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study, archaeology, philology; all history before 1500—except for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarians. Philosophy and its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained, but, to avoid the superstitious errors in ordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr. Macgoblin. Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern languages, but they were not to waste their time on the so-called “literature"; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political speeches, but the chief courses were in advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be mentioned, except Shakespeare and Milton.

Not for Fun, Why so Hilarious? [Part 3] If someone wants you to be bad, you have every right to make him feel bad; If someone wants you to bend, you have every right to make him to take you a bow; If someone wants to lock you, you have every right to keep his key with you; If someone wants to shout at you, you have every right to slip your tongue with him; If someone wants to disbelief you, you have every right to cheat him; If someone wants to blop you, you have every right to make him clap for you; If someone wants to know your potent, you have every right to make him impotent; If someone wants to slap you, you have every right to make his mind block; If someone wants to make you weak, you have every right to pull him down; If someone wants to point at you, you have every right to cut his tail; If someone wants to define you, you have every right to refine him; If someone wants to enmity you, you have every right to make him die for you; If someone wants to threaten you, you have every right to disclose his secrets; If someone wants to play with your bad time, you have every right to make him as your comedy time; If someone wants to scold you, you have every right to talk with him in your mother slang; If someone wants to see your downfall, you have every right to fuck him off; If someone wants to kill you, you have every right to fix his funeral; Afterall, our life is full of air with a body full of hair …. !!! ‘Indian Shakespeare

At Philippi, Bunny, where I said I'd see him. What a rabbit you are at a quotation! "'And I think that the field of Philippi Was where Cæsar came to an end; But who gave old Brutus the tip, I Can't comprehend!' "You may have forgotten your Shakespeare, Bunny, but you ought to remember that.

Twain and Warner were in turn inspired by the Shakespeare quotation “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily . . . is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” The nation now had a distinct upper class, similar to that of England’s aristocracy. The Have Nots In contrast to the riches of the few, there was also crushing poverty for many families during this time.

We opened this chapter with a quotation from the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, but we could just as easily have quoted Buddha (“Our life is the creation of our mind”)2 or Shakespeare (“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”)3 or Milton (“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”).4

It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and oeconomical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.

and thought to tart it up with a few Shakespeare quotations, having a vague recollection from my undergraduate days that the Bard was fond of joking about the great pox. I dusted off my battered copy of the Riverside Shakespeare and started leafing through it. Holy crap, I thought, there is a lot of stuff here on syphilis. My curiosity was piqued, and I did some more digging. Was there a connection between Shakespeare’s syphilitic obsession, contemporary gossip about his sexual misadventures, and the only medical fact known about him with certainty—that his handwriting became tremulous in late middle age? I wrote an article that appeared in Clinical Infectious Diseases, supposing it to be of scant interest beyond its immediate specialty audience. To my surprise, it generated a fair amount of Internet buzz, and inspired a segment on The Daily Show. I began to think that there might be interest in a book on the topic of writers and disease, written from a medical perspective.

A man can smile and smile yet still be a villain,’ I quoted. (Or misquoted. It was probably Shakespeare, most quotations seem to be.)

Do as adversaries do in law, Strive mightily but eat and drink as friends. Taming

Last night I was lying on the bed doing a double crostic and looked up a quotation in the paperbacked Quotation Dictionary that I carry around with me specifically for that purpose. I immediately became lost in the book and read all the Shakespeare ones right through very slowly. There was hardly a line there that I didn't immediately know but seeing the miraculous words in print again doomed me to a long trance of nostalgia, a stupor of melancholy, like listening to really massive music, music that moans and thunders and plumbs fathomless depths. i wandered through the book for a long time but no other writer hit me with quite the same regard as William S. What a stupendous God he was, he is. What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony. It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternity have merely fugued on his million themes.

Flora died in her bed at home on 23 August 1908—Albert Lewis’s forty-fifth birthday. The somewhat funereal quotation for that day on her bedroom calendar was from Shakespeare’s King Lear: “Men must endure their going hence.” For the rest of Albert Lewis’s life, Warnie later discovered, the calendar remained open at that page.

The devil, as Shakespeare wrote, can quote scripture to his purpose, and the historical war over Lincoln and race is a long-running conflict in which scholars and observers deploy quotations from the Lincoln canon to support different arguments—a conflict at once rooted in and reflective of the American experience. “I have only to say, let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position,” Lincoln said in Chicago in 1858.

chapter with a quotation from the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, but we could just as easily have quoted Buddha (“Our life is the creation of our mind”)2 or Shakespeare (“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”)3 or Milton (“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”).4 Or we could have told you the story of Boethius, awaiting execution in the year 524. Boethius reached the pinnacle of success in the late Roman world—he had been a senator and scholar who held many high offices—but he crossed the Ostrogoth king, Theodoric. In The Consolation of Philosophy, written in his jail cell, he describes his (imaginary) encounter with “Lady Philosophy,” who visits him one night and conducts what is essentially a session of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). She chides him gently for his moping, fearfulness, and bitterness at his reversal of fortune, and then she helps him to reframe his thinking and shut off his negative emotions. She helps him see that fortune is fickle and he should be grateful that he enjoyed it for so long. She guides him to reflect on the fact that his wife, children, and father are all still alive and well, and each one is dearer to him than his own life. Each exercise helps him see his situation in a new light; each one weakens the grip of his emotions and prepares him to accept Lady Philosophy’s ultimate lesson: “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”5

There are many ways to find a unicorn. But the simplest is just to let him find you instead. If you’ve ever seen one, you will know that ages can go by without your hearing any mention of them, and in time you might forget they exist altogether. And yet… Sooner or later, they always come back. I’ve experienced this myself often. Last time this happened to me, I was at a Book Fair. There was an odd space, a kind of corridor that was closed-off and dark, and no one was going in. No sooner had I turned the corner than I saw the unicorn. There he was, in a book called Unicorns I Have Known. I’m not sure exactly why, but, from then on, Roger and I have talked about unicorns many times. It’s always the same: whenever you start forgetting about them, something shows up to remind you. As legend has it, only the pure of heart can see them. So if you want to have the experience for yourself: believe. And then they will appear to you, in books, in paintings, in quotations. Unicorns are in Shakespeare, in Lewis Carroll, and many other authors. All of a sudden, you turn a page or you go online and there they are – waiting for you. Claudia de Moraes, 1997

Not for Fun, Why so Hilarious? [Part 2] If someone wants to laugh at you, you have every right to make fun of him; If someone wants to act with you, you have every right to play with his emotions; If someone wants to irritate you, you have every right to stress him; If someone wants to hate you, you have every right to date him; If someone wants to reject you, you have every right to make him hopeless; If someone wants to blackmail you, you have every right to piss him off; If someone wants to order you, you have every right to be disobedient to him; If someone wants to be hot with you, you have every right to boil him; If someone wants to fade you, you have every right to make him know his fate; If someone wants to betray you, you have every right to ill-treat him; If someone wants to crime you, you have every right to punish him; If someone wants to destroy you, you have every right to fight him; If someone wants to tease you, you have every right to make him know your punch; If someone wants to kick you, you have every right to make him kick your goal; If someone wants to hang you, you have every right to make him your bottleneck; If someone wants to show you his anger, you have every right to make him know your temperament; If someone wants you to be his slave, you have every right to make him serve you; ‘Indian Shakespeare

Your son, Hamnet," she said, swallowing. "Does the loss... does it ever abate?" He stilled. She wondered how long it had been since someone spoke that name out loud to him. "It changes," he said carefully. "At times it stops pulling, like a stitch. But then I will be doing something, perhaps crossing a field where I once tossed him onto my shoulder, and I will find myself on my knees sobbing." Shakespeare cleared his throat. "They call it a loss, but that's misconstrued, is it not? They remain with us.

Shakespeare references, from the passing allusion, embedded quotation, or resonant echo occur throughout Dylan’s lyrics, prose and film scripts. Prior to looking at these, it is worth reiterating that Shakespeare and Dylan have much ‘source material’ in common because they share significant cultural backdrops to their lives and works. Moreover, Dylan studied Shakespeare at school as well as many later poets, themselves inevitably influenced by Shakespeare. Consequently, when you hear an echo between the two in their words, there is always the possibility of a common source such as the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, nursery rhymes, the classics, and the balladeers who preceded both. There are other writers in common, too, from the Classical age and from closer to Shakespeare’s own time.