139 Inspiring Shakespeare Quotes

William Shakespeare, often hailed as the greatest playwright and poet of the English language, has left an indelible mark on literature with his profound understanding of human nature. His works, rich with wisdom and intricate wordplay, continue to inspire, captivate, and resonate with readers across the globe. In this collection, we bring you 139 of the most inspiring quotes from Shakespeare’s vast repertoire. Whether you seek motivation, reflection, or a touch of poetic brilliance, these timeless lines offer a glimpse into Shakespeare’s remarkable ability to capture the essence of life’s beauty and complexity. Join us on this literary journey through some of the most evocative and thought-provoking quotes from the Bard himself.

1. “All's well that ends well.” - William Shakespeare

2. “What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.” - William Shakespeare

3. “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

4. “We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.” - Robert Wilensky

5. “Tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than once.” - William Shakespeare

6. “You speak an infinite deal of nothing.” - William Shakespeare

7. “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

8. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” - William Shakespeare

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

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

11. “The Play's the Thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.” - William Shakespeare

12. “To die, - To sleep, - To sleep!Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub;For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause: there's the respectThat makes calamity of so long life;” - William Shakespeare

13. “All causes shall give way: I am in bloodStepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” - William Shakespeare

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

15. “Thou mad mustachio purple-hued maltworms!” - William Shakespeare

16. “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

17. “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?” - William Shakespeare

18. “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

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

20. “It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.” - P.G. Wodehouse

21. “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

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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “O, that he were here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember, that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.” - William Shakespeare

27. “When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.” - D.H. Lawrence

28. “I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: 'Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.' It works wonders.” - Martin Amis

29. “The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.” - Virginia Woolf

30. “I wrote you this poem because i was afraid/ To come out and tell you i want to get laid.” - Jake Wizner

31. “I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.” - Oscar Wilde

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

33. “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

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

35. “You can't just skip the boring parts.""Of course I can skip the boring parts.""How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?""I can tell.""Then you can't say you've read the whole play.""I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.""Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.” - Gary D. Schmidt

36. “Who are these people sharing the street with me? What is going on in their worlds, inside their heads? Are they in love? If so, is it the kind that Mum and Dad have? Based on having things in common, like raspberry picking and a love of dogs, and Shakespeare, and long country walks? Or is it the knock-you-out, eat-you-up, set-you-on-fire kind of love that I have longed for-and avoided-all my life?” - Alison Larkin

37. “If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.” - William Shakespeare

38. “I have lived one step away from losing my mind for years. I am quick and accurate in spotting unstable streaks in others.” - Charlaine Harris

39. “True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings.” - William Shakespeare

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

41. “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

42. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Your fate awaits you. Accept it in body and spirit. To get used to the life you'll most likely be leading soon, get rid of your low-class trappings.” - William Shakespeare

43. “. . . 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

44. “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

45. “It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one's sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he coauthored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher).” - James Shapiro

46. “If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is farther to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise -why, be that as it may, the more fool you , for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness' sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.” - Bernard Levin

47. “Teagan: How long has it been since you read a book that didn’t havevampires in it?Abby: They write books with no vampires? Wait...the penguins made us read that Shakesrear guy, right?Teagan: Shakespeare.” - Kersten Hamilton

48. “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

49. “She moves me not, or not removes at least affection's edge in me.” - William Shakespeare

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

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

52. “To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.” - Roger Zelazny

53. “He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.‘Quite so…” - Aldous Huxley

54. “For this new-married man approaching here,Whose salt imagination yet hath wrong'dYour well defended honour, you must pardonFor Mariana's sake: but as he adjudged your brother,--Being criminal, in double violationOf sacred chastity and of promise-breachThereon dependent, for your brother's life,--The very mercy of the law cries outMost audible, even from his proper tongue,'An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!'Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;Like doth quit like, and MEASURE still FOR MEASURE” - William Shakespeare

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

56. “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

57. “When I do count the clock that tells the time,And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;When I behold the violet past prime,And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;When lofty trees I see barren of leavesWhich erst from heat did canopy the herd,And summer's green all girded up in sheavesBorne on the bier with white and bristly beard,Then of thy beauty do I question make,That thou among the wastes of time must go,Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsakeAnd die as fast as they see others grow;And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defenceSave breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.” - William Shakespeare

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

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

60. “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

61. “The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness. And in the taste destroys the appetite. Therefore, love moderately.” - William Shakespeare

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

63. “There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

64. “THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD!!!!” - Rick Riordan

65. “Why can’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You’ll find what you’re trying to say in him- as you’ll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.''- 'Fine! That’s beautiful. But I wasn’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it. That’s more my idea.” - Eugene O'Neill

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

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

68. “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

69. “Shakespeare’s enduring tragedy did its part to further the goals of the Mercenaries—glamorizing death, making dying for love seem the most noble act of all, though nothing could be further from the truth. Taking an innocent life—in a misguided attempt to prove love or for any other reason—is a useless waste.” - Stacey Jay

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

71. “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

72. “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

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

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

75. “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

76. “What would you have? Your gentleness shall force More than your force move us to gentleness.” - William Shakespeare

77. “The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow.” - W.B. Yeats

78. “I am haunted by the ghost of my father, I think that should allow me to quote Hamlet as much as I please.” - Erin Morgenstern

79. “I suppose the fundamental distinction between Shakespeare and myself is one of treatment. We get our effects differently. Take the familiar farcical situation of someone who suddenly discovers that something unpleasant is standing behind them. Here is how Shakespeare handles it in "The Winter's Tale," Act 3, Scene 3:ANTIGONUS: Farewell! A lullaby too rough. I never saw the heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour! Well may I get aboard! This is the chase: I am gone for ever.And then comes literature's most famous stage direction, "Exit pursued by a bear." All well and good, but here's the way I would handle it:BERTIE: Touch of indigestion, Jeeves?JEEVES: No, Sir.BERTIE: Then why is your tummy rumbling?JEEVES: Pardon me, Sir, the noise to which you allude does not emanate from my interior but from that of that animal that has just joined us.BERTIE: Animal? What animal?JEEVES: A bear, Sir. If you will turn your head, you will observe that a bear is standing in your immediate rear inspecting you in a somewhat menacing manner.BERTIE (as narrator): I pivoted the loaf. The honest fellow was perfectly correct. It was a bear. And not a small bear, either. One of the large economy size. Its eye was bleak and it gnashed a tooth or two, and I could see at a g. that it was going to be difficult for me to find a formula. "Advise me, Jeeves," I yipped. "What do I do for the best?"JEEVES: I fancy it might be judicious if you were to make an exit, Sir.BERTIE (narrator): No sooner s. than d. I streaked for the horizon, closely followed across country by the dumb chum. And that, boys and girls, is how your grandfather clipped six seconds off Roger Bannister's mile.Who can say which method is superior?"(As reproduced in Plum, Shakespeare and the Cat Chap )” - P.G. Wodehouse

80. “To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand yearsWill Hardly leach,” he thought, “this dust of that fire.” - Robinson Jeffers

81. “In fact, Shakespeare was right when he said ‘twice a babe once a man’. We are born into the world as helpless, weak infants, and some of us end our lives as vulnerable, frail adults, unable to speak coherently, or do even the simplest tasks.” - George Korankye

82. “Mother, you have my father much offended.” - William Shakespeare

83. “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

84. “He is Romeo, and he is heartbroken. Every word is wistful. When he says, 'O, teach me how I should forget to think!' I, for the first time, see what the big deal is about Shakespeare.” - Nina LaCour

85. “Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare's meals and beer in the tavern. The statesman who in his time freed the slaves, even he has a few enemies in posterity, whereas the literary patron has none. We thank Gaius Maecenas for the nobility of soul we attribute to Virgil; but he isn’t blamed for the selfishness and egocentricity that the poet possessed. The patron creates 'literature through altruism,' something not even the greatest genius can do with a pen.” - Roman Payne

86. “To be, or not to be: what a question!” - E.A. Bucchianeri

87. “You and those shot-glass eyes, deep swirling pools of 80-proof firewater, with the depth and profundity of Saturn’s spinning pulsars…” - Brandi L. Bates

88. “Sometimes...the hardest part about letting someone go is realizing that you were never meant to have them.” - Rebecca Serle

89. “How do you mourn something that never really belonged to you?” - Rebecca Serle

90. “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

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

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

93. “Oh, William, what pitiable creatures we men are! When we go to church we make the devil angry, when we enjoy ourselves in the inns, we make God angry; we are the unlucky lot stuck between two fires!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

94. “It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.” - Karen Blixen

95. “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

96. “Books are Lighthouses erected in the sea of time." Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest” - Alex St. Clair

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

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

99. “...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

100. “He is indeed the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.” - Washington Irving

101. “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

102. “Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann's, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones.” - Catharine Arnold

103. “We will meet; and there we may rehearse mostobscenely and courageously.Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream. Spoken by Bottom, Act I Sc. 2” - William Shakespeare

104. “If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.” - W.H. Auden

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “Strike as thou didst at Caesar; for I know / When though didst hate him worst, thou loved’st him better / Than ever thou loved’st Cassius.” - William Shakespeare

110. “I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.” - Nathan Reese Maher

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

116. “Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,— For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” - William Shakespeare

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

118. “Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.” - Samuel Johnson

119. “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

120. “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

121. “All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare” - Jorge Luis Borges

122. “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

123. “We probably read Shakespeare in the first place for his stories, afterwards for his characters. . . . To become intimate with Shakespeare in this way is a great enrichment of mind and instruction of conscience. Then, by degrees, as we go on reading this world-teacher, lines of insight and beauty take possession of us, and unconsciously mould our judgments of men and things and of the great issues of life.” - Charlotte Mason

124. “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

125. “Shall I compare thee to a Shoggoth?” - D.R. O'Brien

126. “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

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

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

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

130. “Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.” - John Irving

131. “Perhaps talk of counters turned the boy’s thoughts to his father’s glove shop. His father would have accounted for all his transactions using the tokens. They were hard and round and very thin, made of copper or brass. There were counters for one pair of gloves, and for two pairs, and three and four and five. But there was no counter for zero. No counters existed for all the sales that his father did not close.” - Daniel Tammet

132. “such wanton, wild, and usual slips/ As are companions noted and most known/ To youth and liberty.” - William Shakespeare

133. “willow trees, willow trees they remind me of DesdemonaI'm so damned literaryand at the same time the waters rushing past remindme of nothing” - Frank O'Hara

134. “O, mickle is the powerful grace that liesIn herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:For nought so vile that on the earth doth liveBut to the earth some special good doth give,Nor aught so good but strain’d from that fair useRevolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;And vice sometimes by action dignified.Within the infant rind of this small flowerPoison hath residence and medicine power:For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.Two such opposed kings encamp them stillIn man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;And where the worser is predominant,Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.” - William Shakespeare

135. “Do not speak unflatteringly of Jane," Flora said, walking beside Chad. "She is the greatest writer to have ever lived." "I thought that was Shakespeare." "William was, or course, quite good," Flora said. "But no one can compare to Jane Austen.” - Krista McGee

136. “Well, what do you know? Fakespeare!” - Hillary DePiano

137. “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

138. “You mar our labour: keep your cabins:you do assist the storm[...] What cares these roarers for the name of king?” - William Shakespeare

139. “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