Top 485 Shakespeare Quotes

Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge.

We need to take a far more active role in love than ‘Romeo and Juliet’ would lead us to believe. Perhaps that’s what Shakespeare’s saying, in a way. We can’t leave it all up to fate.

Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.

I’m grateful to be working. The most exciting thing for me is that I never get bored – I’ve done comedy, drama, musical theatre and now Shakespeare.

On occasion, a well-constructed drama can do what no reality or news program can do, what Shakespeare does brilliantly, is it can show both sides’ opinions.

I think academics are infuriating. For every expert on Shakespeare there is another one to cancel his theory out. It drives you up the wall. I think the greatest form of finding out the truth is through fantasy.

Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.

Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.

When you’re working class and you feel like you’re a bit of a toerag, you think Shakespeare’s not for you, you know?

My parents are the reason I wanted to make Shakespeare available to ordinary people.

In any long string of letters, one can find countless anomalies that will seem like convincing proofs of hidden meaning to the mind that wants to believe that the text is somehow special. Numerological tricks, for example, can demonstrate that William Shakespeare wrote the ‘King James Bible.’

I don’t think my looks are modern. I always imagined I’d end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.

Nobody will go on being remembered for a very long time, unless you’re Shakespeare or Milton. I have no hope of being remembered at all.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can’t stand it.

I’d like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God’s a workman. I don’t think there’s anything better than a workman.

I’m one of those people that feels that Americans that shouldn’t do Shakespeare… The rhythms of the English language and the mannerisms of the English speech seems to work effortlessly with William Shakespeare, but when Americans do it, something seems stuck.

By all means, let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes, but let us study them for our guidance: that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke.

I wanted to have a house near his grave, and that’s exactly what I did get. When I woke up in the morning, I would open my window and look out upon Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare’s grave is. Not once did it fail to move me.

I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn’t imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.

In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn’t fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.

My writing improved the more I wrote – and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.

With ‘True Grit,’ the language was very specific, as is Shakespeare. You couldn’t really improvise, nor would you really ever have to. I never felt the need to. It was all so beautifully written, and it was all right there.

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.

I never wanted to become an actress because I’d read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

There’s that old adage about how there’s only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare’s done them all before.

I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.

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.

Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He’s the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship – Shakespeare, Cervantes.

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.

I feel like Shakespeare is so epic, in a way that sci-fi genre stuff is epic, it transcends the mundane, and it takes you to this place of real passion and real beauty.

If an L.A. actor is a star or a good face, and they want to get cred by doing a serious Shakespeare play, they will come to New York first.

My background isn’t in social software; it’s in online community, social networks, personal publishing, blogging, self-expression on the Web. I got on the Internet in the 1980s, and the magic moment for me arose from my being a literature geek, especially Dante and Shakespeare.

The thing that I have a horror of is ideological theatre – Shakespeare never told us how to think.

Why is the public so interested in movies about the wealthy? My answer is that Shakespeare wrote about kings. That’s where the action is. And it’s the classic, cathartic thing. You get to indulge in a lifestyle you’re not part of, a tragic error leads to a downfall, and you get to say, ‘Thank God I’m not him.’

I want to play Eva Peron. I’ve already done a lot of Shakespeare, but I’d like to do Lady Macbeth.

When you get the high art of William Shakespeare and the greatest love story ever told, and you collision crash it with the low art of the tacky garden gnome, you’re going to have lots and lots of opportunity for fun and putting your tongue very firmly in your cheek.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone.

When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.

And you know, I hate to admit this, but I don’t always think in terms of Shakespeare. When I eat, I do. When I’m at a restaurant, I’ll think, ‘Hmm, what would Macbeth have ordered?’

I’ve got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I’ve done it.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

One reason why Shakespeare’s plays remain so popular is that they’re now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.

I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare’s political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms – to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.

I’ve always adored Shakespeare.

In Shakespeare, unique individuals repudiate the stereotypes demanded by the structure of the play: Shylock commands our sympathy, Barnardine refuses to be hanged. Individuals trump the category.

There’s something about doing Shakespeare with a single gender, whether it is all-male or all-female, that opens up certain possibilities. You are able to throw the behavior of the men into a particular relief and be playful within a slightly larger-than-life way with it.

I saw a Shakespeare play when I was – I guess I was in junior high. And I just fell in love with the theater because, for me, it was a combination of big ideas and feeling.

I have a personal issue with Shakespeare. When I first encountered him, he made me feel thick. Well, not him, but the productions I saw.

I don’t know, I’d love to try some theater. That’s my other thing. I’d love to do some Shakespeare.