108 Shakespeare Quotes

William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, has left an indelible mark on literature with his masterful storytelling and profound insights into the human condition. His works have been a source of inspiration, reflection, and sometimes, a bit of fun for centuries. Whether you're a long-time fan or new to his oeuvre, exploring the wisdom embedded in his timeless quotes can be a deeply rewarding experience. Here, we've curated a collection of the top 108 Shakespeare quotes that capture the essence of his genius, offering a glimpse into his unparalleled ability to navigate the complexities of life, love, power, and more. Dive in and let the words of Shakespeare resonate with your soul.

1. “These violent delights have violent endsAnd in their triumph die, like fire and powder,Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honeyIs loathsome in his own deliciousnessAnd in the taste confounds the appetite.Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.” - William Shakespeare

2. “They lie deadly that tell you have good faces.” - William Shakespeare

3. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand'ring barque, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” - William Shakespeare

4. “Et tu, Brute?” - William Shakespeare

5. “I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that 'the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.' I could not have phrased it better myself.” - Dave Barry

6. “What's in a name, anyway? That which we call a nose by any other name would still smell.” - The Reduced Shakespeare Company

7. “Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.” - William Shakespeare

8. “Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,Is the immediate jewel of their souls:Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;But he that filches from me my good nameRobs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed.” - William Shakespeare

9. “Thou art a very ragged Wart.” - William Shakespeare

10. “Thine face is not worth sunburning.” - William Shakespeare

11. “Your face, my thane, is as a book where menMay read strange matters. To beguile the time,Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,But be the serpent under't.” - William Shakespeare

12. “Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.” - William Shakespeare

13. “What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,The labor of an age in pilèd stones,Or that his hallowed relics should be hidUnder a star-y-pointing pyramid?Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?” - John Milton

14. “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,And for thy maintenance; commits his bodyTo painful labor, both by sea and land;To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe;And craves no other tribute at thy handsBut love, fair looks, and true obedience-Too little payment for so great a debt.Such duty as the subject owes the prince,Even such a woman oweth to her husband;And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,And no obedient to his honest will,What is she but a foul contending rebel,And graceless traitor to her loving lord?I asham’d that women are so simple‘To offer war where they should kneel for peace,Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth,Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,But that our soft conditions, and our hearts,Should well agree with our external parts?” - William Shakespeare

15. “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, And too often is his gold complexion dimm'd: And every fair from fair sometimes declines, By chance or natures changing course untrimm'd; By thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.” - William Shakespeare

16. “Educated men are so impressive!” - William Shakespeare

17. “I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.” - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

18. “If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, I must be dafter than I look.” - Jasper Fforde

19. “Life... is a paradise to what we fear of death.” - William Shakespeare

20. “To be or not to be?' That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. 'To become more or not to become more' This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe.” - Truman G. Madsen

21. “I know that David Tennant's Hamlet isn't till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush..."To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and... for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?” - Neil Gaiman

22. “What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?” - Virginia Woolf

23. “They are the books, the arts, the academes,That show, contain and nourish all the world.” - William Shakespeare

24. “I drink to the general joy o’ the whole table." Macbeth” - William Shakespeare

25. “Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter! My lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a jakes with him. *all cheer for Shakespearean insults*” - William Shakespeare

26. “England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.” - Victor Hugo

27. “And since you know you cannot see yourself,so well as by reflection, I, your glass,will modestly discover to yourself,that of yourself which you yet know not of.” - William Shakespeare

28. “Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

29. “But Kate, dost thou understand thus much English? Canst thou love me?"Catherine: "I cannot tell."Henry: "Can any of your neighbours tell, Kate? I'll ask them.” - William Shakespeare

30. “In the State of Denmark there was the odor of decay...” - Roger Zelazny

31. “Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.” - Peter Porter

32. “The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later.” - Peter Porter

33. “One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. Experiences and aspirations of which intimations may be found in Plato, Nietzsche, and Spinoza have found their most evocative expression in some sacred books. Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.” - Walter Kaufmann

34. “. . . when a woman has a husbandAnd you've got none,Why should she take advice from you?Even if you can quote Balzac and ShakespeareAnd all them other highfalutin' Greeks. ” - Meredith Willson

35. “Miss Rasputin, what a delight to finally meet you,” said the vamp, speaking with only the faintest hint of an accent.“Let’s hope you still feel that way in a few minutes, Mr. Delacroix.”“Pierre, please. And may I call you Evangaline?” Pierre smiled at her winsomely.“No, you may not. My name is Ms. Rasputin to you.”Her answer took the vamp aback, but he recovered quickly and smiled again showing off his small pointed canines. Pierre’s dark eyes flicked over to Ryker in his feline form and he raised an aristocratic brow. “My, what a big pussy you have.”“You know what they say, the bigger the better.” - Eve Langlais

36. “So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.” - Christopher Hitchens

37. “A southwest blow on ye and blister you all o'er!''The red plague rid you!''Toads, beetles, bats, light on you!''As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed with raven's feather from unwholesome fen drop on you.''Strange stuff''Thou jesting monkey thou''Apes with foreheads villainous low''Pied ninny''Blind mole...' -The Caliban Curses” - Gary D. Schmidt

38. “By my soul I swear, there is no power in the tongue of man to alter me.” - William Shakespeare

39. “He kills her in her own humor.” - Shakespeare

40. “If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.” - George Orwell

41. “i heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.” - Bill Hirst

42. “To die, is to be banish'd from myself; And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her, Is self from self: a deadly banishment! What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by? Unless it be to think that she is by, And feed upon the shadow of perfection.Except I be by Silvia in the night, There is no music in the nightingale; Unless I look on Silvia in the day, There is no day for me to look upon; She is my essence, and I leave to be, If I be not by her fair influence Foster'd, illumin'd, cherish'd, kept alive.” - William Shakespeare

43. “Shakespeare, in some sense, helped create the modern man, didn't he, his influence is that pervasive. He held the mirror up to nature, but he also created that mirror: so the image he created is the very one we hold ourselves up to.” - Jess Winfield

44. “To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently abeast!” - William Shakespeare

45. “Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.” - Barbara de Angelis

46. “Well said, old mole!” - Shakespeare

47. “The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.” - Alfred North Whitehead

48. “Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream” - William Shakespeare

49. “Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.” - William Shakespeare

50. “Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?” - Jennifer Donnelly

51. “Here's one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: it's damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about. Look, the sheer fact that people have banged out book after article after dramatic interpretation of this guy should tell you that despite his eloquence, he wasn't the clearest of communicators.” - Eleanor Brown

52. “Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, 'So this is how it feels,' and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own.” - Neil Gaiman

53. “Wir können uns von Shakespeare unterscheiden, durch Fehler.” - Peter Hacks

54. “I take thee at thy word:Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;Henceforth I never will be Romeo.” - William Shakespeare

55. “Oh, if Shakespeare says it, that's all right.” - L. Frank Baum

56. “Hamlet's Cat's Soliloquy"To go outside, and there perchance to stayOr to remain within: that is the question:Whether 'tis better for a cat to suffer The cuffs and buffets of inclement weatherThat Nature rains on those who roam abroad,Or take a nap upon a scrap of carpet,And so by dozing melt the solid hoursThat clog the clock's bright gears with sullen timeAnd stall the dinner bell. To sit, to stareOutdoors, and by a stare to seem to stateA wish to venture forth without delay,Then when the portal's opened up, to standAs if transfixed by doubt. To prowl; to sleep;To choose not knowing when we may once more Our readmittance gain: aye, there's the hairball;For if a paw were shaped to turn a knob,Or work a lock or slip a window-catch,And going out and coming in were madeAs simple as the breaking of a bowl,What cat would bear the houselhold's petty plagues,The cook's well-practiced kicks, the butler's broom,The infant's careless pokes, the tickled ears,The trampled tail, and all the daily shocksThat fur is heir to, when, of his own will,He might his exodus or entrance makeWith a mere mitten? Who would spaniels fear,Or strays trespassing from a neighbor's yard,But that the dread of our unheeded cries And scraches at a barricaded doorNo claw can open up, dispels our nerveAnd makes us rather bear our humans' faultsThan run away to unguessed miseries?Thus caution doth make house cats of us all;And thus the bristling hair of resolutionIs softened up with the pale brush of thought,And since our choices hinge on weighty things,We pause upon the threshold of decision.” - Henry N. Beard

57. “What do you do when the alienating silence deafens your 'bootless cries'?” - Solange nicole

58. “The longer I lived, the longer it would be until I saw him alive again, until I could taste his new lips and run my fingers through his new hair. We could be young and beautiful again . . .” - Chelsie Shakespeare

59. “When we can't understand the science behind something in this world, we make up mythological entities that we can relate to. We personify the forces of nature that mystify us, using our boundless imaginations to comfort us and make us feel like we have some control over these things that are much bigger than we are.” - Chelsie Shakespeare

60. “I don't think that science and the paranormal have to be at war; in fact, it's crucial that they work together. It seems naïve to believe that the world is exactly as it seems.” - Chelsie Shakespeare

61. “He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.” - Chelsie Shakespeare

62. “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause” - William Shakespeare

63. “It seems only fair," Matthew continued. "A bit of karma, if you will." He twirled the stake again. "Shall we see how long you scream?""Are you ever going to shut up?" I snapped, fear and irritation filling me in equal measures. "This isn't your monologue, Hamlet. It's the battle scene, in case you've forgotten."His eyes narrowed so fast they nearly sparked. They were the color of honey on fire. One of the others growled like an animal, low in his throat. It made all the hairs on my arms stand straight up.I was going to die for making fun of Shakespeare.My English Lit professor would be so proud.” - Alyxandra Harvey

64. “If you want more people to come to the theatre, don't put the prices at £50. You have to make theatre inclusive, and at the moment the prices are exclusive. Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people in the right parts. Stunt casting and being gimmicky does the theatre a great disservice. You have to lure people by getting them excited about a theatrical experience.” - Catherine Tate

65. “LEELA: 'To be, or not to be, that is the question.' That is a very stupid question!THE DOCTOR: It's Shakespeare.LEELA: And that is a very stupid name. You do not shake a spear, you throw it! Throwspeare, now that is a name.” - John Dorney

66. “At this hourLie at my mercy all mine enemies.” - William Shakespeare

67. “Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of our generation you shall find.” - William Shakespeare

68. “By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, but music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night and his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.” - William Shakespeare

69. “O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping.” - William Shakespeare

70. “I think he'll be to Rome as is the osprey to the fish, who takes it by sovereignty of nature.” - William Shakespeare

71. “And now to sleep, to dream...perchance to fart.” - Anthony Bourdain

72. “...imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.” - Hector Berlioz

73. “And it's what you never will write," said the Controller. "Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn't possibly be like Othello.” - Aldous Huxley

74. “My love is as a fever, longing stillFor that which longer nurseth the disease;Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,The uncertain sickly appetite to please.My reason, the physician to my love,Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,Hath left me, and I desperate now approve,Desire his death, which physic did except.Past cure I am, now reason is past care,And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,At random from the truth vainly express'd;For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.” - William Shakespeare

75. “After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits his goods and places his life at the Doge’s mercy. […] Shakespeare, it seems to me, was willing to introduce what is an absurd implausibility for the sake of an effect which he could not secure without it: at the last moment when, through his conduct, Shylock has destroyed any sympathy we may have felt for him earlier, we are reminded that, irrespective of his personal character, his status is one of inferiority. A Jew is not regarded, even in law, as a brother.” - W.H. Auden

76. “Coleridge’s description of Iago’s actions as "motiveless malignancy" applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian villains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive, and, secondly, that the motive is not the desire for personal revenge upon another for a personal injury. Iago himself proffers two reasons for wishing to injure Othello and Cassio. He tells Roderigo that, in appointing Cassio to be his lieutenant, Othello has treated him unjustly, in which conversation he talks like the conventional Elizabethan malcontent. In his soliloquies with himself, he refers to his suspicion that both Othello and Cassio have made him a cuckold, and here he talks like the conventional jealous husband who desires revenge. But there are, I believe, insuperable objections to taking these reasons, as some critics have done, at their face value.” - W.H. Auden

77. “More grief to hide than hate to utter love. Polonius, Hamlet.” - William Shakespeare

78. “As Shakespeare says, if you're going to do a thing you might as well pop right at it and get it over.” - P.G. Wodehouse

79. “Who knows himself a braggart, let him fear this, for it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass.” - William Shakespeare

80. “This story shall the good man teach his son;And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,From this day to the ending of the world,But we in it shall be remembered-We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;For he to-day that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,This day shall gentle his condition;And gentlemen in England now-a-bedShall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day” - Shakespeare's Henry V

81. “All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.” - Nathan Reese Maher

82. “Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.” - Nathan Reese Maher

83. “There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomachin a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in thedarkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.” - Nathan Reese Maher

84. “I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.” - Nathan Reese Maher

85. “She leaves my side and heads deeper intothe apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… acopper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.” - Nathan Reese Maher

86. “That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their rightmind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what youshould name it.” - Nathan Reese Maher

87. “Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lostmemories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreamsplay when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?” - Nathan Reese Maher

88. “History doesn’t start with a tall buildingand a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is takingus for suckers and is playing a mean game.” - Nathan Reese Maher

89. “The ability for anyone in our generation to self-amuse has sadly been bred out of our species.” - Kim Askew

90. “No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.” - Harold Bloom

91. “The composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelting to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity.” - Samuel Johnson

92. “Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales.” - Samuel Johnson

93. “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

94. “After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?” - Dejan Stojanovic

95. “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.” - Stephen Greenblatt

96. “Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then.” - Frederick Buechner

97. “By the power of the Tri-Force, I command you to "-------” - Prashna Bari

98. “[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.” - Michael D. O'Brien

99. “A few people have ventured to imitate Shakespeare's tragedy. But no audacious spirit has dreamed or dared to imitate Shakespeare's comedy. No one has made any real attempt to recover the loves and the laughter of Elizabethan England. The low dark arches, the low strong pillars upon which Shakespeare's temple rests we can all explore and handle. We can all get into his mere tragedy; we can all explore his dungeon and penetrate into his coal-cellar, but we stretch our hands and crane our necks in vain towards that height where the tall turrets of his levity are tossed towards the sky. Perhaps it is right that this should be so; properly understood, comedy is an even grander thing than tragedy.” - G.K. Chesterton

100. “Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.” - William Shakespeare

101. “It is something to have gazed on the constellated white, felt it running from the eyes and the pores: the salt of love. It is something to have whispered wild thank-yous in the only ways we know how.” - Bryana Johnson

102. “...I love Shakespeare, but sometimes....his images - If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head....” - John Geddes

103. “The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law.” - William Shakespeare

104. “O ill-starred wench! Pale as your smock!” - William Shakespeare

105. “Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!” - Charles Dickens

106. “We too often forget that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil,' but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.” - Herbert Spencer

107. “He was digging in his garden--digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death--and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools they way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last... He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kills us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true--truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams...?” - Aldous Huxley

108. “Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkissed.” - William Shakespeare