76 Shakespeare Quotes

William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, has left an indelible mark on literature and the English language with his timeless works. His plays and poetry are brimming with wisdom, wit, and observations on the human condition that continue to resonate today. Whether you’re a student, a lover of literature, or someone seeking inspiration, Shakespeare's quotes offer profound insights and captivating eloquence. In this blog post, we’ve curated a collection of the top 76 Shakespeare quotes that encapsulate the essence of his genius. Dive in and discover the enduring power of his words, which have transcended centuries and continue to inspire countless individuals across the globe.

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. “Sweet are the uses of adversity,Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;And this our life, exempt from public haunt,Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” - William Shakespeare

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

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

5. “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

6. “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

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

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

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

10. “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

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

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

13. “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

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

16. “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

17. “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

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

19. “A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.” - Bill Bryson

20. “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

21. “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

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

23. “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

24. “With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.” - William Shakespeare

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

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

27. “Shakespeare's ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece, where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the dew on the grass in Venus, but the ill-lit world of Livy's Rome darkens Lucrece. The first poem lives out of doors; the second is in a permanent chiaroscuro.” - Peter Porter

28. “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

29. “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

30. “. . . 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

31. “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

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

33. “My dull brain was wrought with things forgotten.” - William Shakespeare

34. “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

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

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

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

38. “Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.” - Ray Bradbury

39. “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

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

41. “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

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

43. “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

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

45. “He would reach for me in the middle of the night, nearly every single night, wrapping one of those solid arms around my waist and pulling me in close. So. Close.” - Chelsie Shakespeare

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

47. “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

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

49. “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

50. “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

51. “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

52. “They died together; they'll always be remembered together. It's decided, once and for all. He was hers.” - Rebecca Serle

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

54. “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

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

56. “...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

57. “...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

58. “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

59. “I read that I profess, the Art of Love.Bianca: And may you prove, sir, master of your art!Lucentio: While you, sweet dear, prove mistress of my heart!” - William Shakespeare

60. “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

61. “Ambition should be made from sterner stuff.” - William Shakespeare

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

63. “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

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

65. “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

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

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

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

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

70. “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

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

72. “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

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

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

75. “What, all so soon asleep! I wish mine eyesWould, with themselves, shut up my thoughts...” - William Shakespeare

76. “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