55 Shakespeare Quotes To Remember

William Shakespeare, the illustrious bard of Avon, has gifted the world with an unparalleled legacy of literary brilliance. His works traverse the complexities of human nature, exploring themes of love, ambition, betrayal, and redemption. Within his plays and sonnets lie words that have resonated through the ages, illuminating the beauty and depth of the English language. This curated collection of the top 55 Shakespeare quotes offers a glimpse into the genius of Shakespeare's craft, each quote encapsulating timeless wisdom, profound insights, and the enduring power of his poetry. Whether you're a seasoned admirer or new to his work, these quotes are sure to leave an indelible mark on your soul, inviting you to explore the depths of Shakespeare's unparalleled imagination.

1. “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

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

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

4. “O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!Dove-feather'd raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!Despised substance of divinest show!Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st,A damned saint, an honourable villain!O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell;When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiendIn mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?Was ever book containing such vile matterSo fairly bound? O that deceit should dwellIn such a gorgeous palace!” - William Shakespeare

5. “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

6. “I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itselfAnd falls on the other.” - William Shakespeare

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

8. “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

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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!” - Derek Jarman

14. “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

15. “If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?” - Virginia Woolf

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

17. “Alack, there lies more peril in thine eyeThan twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet,And I am proof against their enmity.” - William Shakespeare

18. “In high school, we barely brushed against Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or any of the other so-unserious writers who delight everyone they touch. This was, after all, a very expensive and important school. Instead, I was force-fed a few of Shakespeare's Greatest Hits, although the English needed translation, the broad comedy and wrenching drama were lost, and none of the magnificently dirty jokes were ever explained. (Incidentally, Romeo and Juliet, fully appreciated, might be banned in some U.S. states.) This was the Concordance again, and little more. So we'd read all the lines aloud, resign ourselves to a ponderous struggle, and soon give up the plot completely.” - Bob Harris

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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

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

24. “And nothing is, but what is not.” - William Shakespeare

25. “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

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

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

28. “La vida es mi tortura y la muerte será mi descanso.” - William Shakespeare

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

30. “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

31. “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

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

33. “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

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

35. “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

36. “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

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

38. “...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

39. “...I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...” - John Geddes

40. “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

41. “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

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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Did Bach ever eatpancakes at midnight?” - Nathan Reese Maher

46. “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

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

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

49. “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

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

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

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

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

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

55. “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