Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Quotes
"He heard things in the sounds of words that others did not hear; he made connections that others did not make; and he was flooded with a pleasure all his own."
"All men covet to have their children speak Latin."
"Learning Latin in this period was, as a modern scholar has put it, a male puberty rite."
"The queen spoke Latin—one of the few women in the realm to have had access to that accomplishment, so crucial for international relations."
"The eye hath not seen, and the ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man" those things that God has prepared (1 Corinthians 2:9).
"Shakespeare, who had already written such plays as The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III, was capable of a very different kind of dramatic speech, altogether tougher and leaner."
"The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them."
"Virtually all of his close relatives were farmers, and in his childhood he clearly spent a great deal of time in their orchards and market gardens, in the surrounding fields and woods."
"For Shakespeare, leather was not only a means of providing vivid detail but also the stuff of metaphor."
"The core biographical records of the poet’s adult life are real estate documents."
"Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?"
"It’s monstrous labour when I wash my brain, / An it grow fouler."
"The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood."
"How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!"
"I have long dreamt of such a kind of man, / So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane; / But being awake, I do despise my dream."
"All his mind is bent to holiness / To number Ave-Maries on his beads" - 2 Henry VI, 1.3.59–60.
"How dare the pope... impose his will upon a 'sacred king'?" - King John, 3.1.74–84.
"O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do: Then pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair." - Romeo and Juliet, 1.5.100–107.
"That no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions." - King John, 3.1.74–84.
"I shall report, For most it caught me, the celestial habits—Methinks I so should term them—and the reverence Of the grave wearers." - The Winter’s Tale, 3.1.3–8.
"I heard myself proclaimed... Escaped the hunt. No port is free; no place, That guard, and most unusual vigilance, Does not attend my taking." - King Lear, 2.3.1–6.
"I loved the maid I married; never man Sighed truer breath." - Coriolanus, 4.5.113–17.
"Men are April when they woo, December when they wed." - As You Like It, 4.1.124–27.
"For what is wedlock forcèd but a hell, An age of discord and continual strife." - 1Henry VI, 5.7.62–65.
"In such a night Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well, Stealing her soul with many vows of faith, And ne’er a true one." - The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.14–19.
"Nature, that framed us of four elements, Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds." - Henry VI
"How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown, Within whose circuit is Elysium And all that poets feign of bliss and joy." - Henry VI
"I have seen Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him by the chain." - Henry VI
"Millions of souls sit on the banks of Styx, Waiting the back return of Charon’s boat. Hell and Elysium swarm with ghosts of men That I have sent." - Henry VI
"Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world And measure every wand'ring planet's course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite And always moving as the restless spheres, Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest Until we reach the ripest fruit of all: That perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown." - Henry VI
"I will stir up in England some black storm Shall blow ten thousand souls to heaven or hell, And this fell tempest shall not cease to rage Until the golden circuit on my head Like to the glorious sun's transparent beams Do calm the fury of this mad-bred flaw." - Henry VI
"Indeed it may be the engrafted overflow of some kill-cow conceit, that overcloyeth their imagination with a more than drunken resolution, being not extemporal in the invention of any other means to vent their manhood, commits the digestion of their choleric encumbrances to the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon." - Henry VI
"They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly, But bear-like I must fight the course." - Henry VI
"If there be any cunning cruelty That can torment him much and hold him long, It shall be his." - Henry VI
"To see the animal kicking amongst the dogs, with the screams of the ape, beholding the curs hanging from the ears and neck of the pony, is very laughable." - Henry VI
"To succeed in creating his illusion, the actor needed not only expensive costumes but also persuasive words, poetry that he, a mere sham gentleman, could not generate."
"Roberto now famozed for an Arch-playmaking poet, his purse like the sea sometime swelled, anon like the same sea fell to a low ebb; yet seldom he wanted, his labors were so well esteemed."
"His mistress, Em Ball—with whom he had a short-lived son whom he named Fortunatus—was the sister of the leader of a gang of thieves, one Cutting Ball, who was eventually hanged at Tyburn."
"Greene, setting himself up as a kind of ethnographer, made money turning out pamphlets introducing respectable English readers to London’s dense society of cheats, swindlers, and pickpockets."
"An oath breaker and a foulmouthed blasphemer, Greene is a man with no moral compass, and his life is a shambles."
"Shakespeare’s relations to Greene and company might at first have been cordial."
"Who in London hath not heard of his dissolute and licentious living?"
"Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be."
"Being your slave, what should I do but tend Upon the hours and times of your desire?"
"O, for my sake do you with fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds."
"He makes a July’s day short as December, And with his varying childness cures in me Thoughts that would thick my blood."
"I am not mad; I would to God I were! For then, 'tis like I should forget myself."
"If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?"
"Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy; My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all."
"He had perfected the means to represent inwardness."
"What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word."
"I am thy father’s spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night."
"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!"
"No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?"
"Wake Duncan with thy knocking. I would thou couldst."
"The absence of any clear or logical pattern of artistic development."
"Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint."
"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air."
"The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance."
"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
"Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange."
"Ask her forgiveness? Do you but mark how this becomes the house: 'Dear daughter, I confess that I am old; Age is unnecessary.'"
"My way of life Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf, And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have."
"This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries."
"I have bedimmed the noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, and ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault set roaring war."