c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.
— Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
Sometimes what we want lies behind a door our own actions have locked tight.
— Natasha Knight, Captive, Mine
I miss you like the mismatching sock I can't find. You're out there somewhere.
— Karen Quan, Better to be able to love than to be loveable
The many contradictions in our lives – such as being home while feeling homeless, being busy while feeling bored, being popular while feeling lonely, being believers while feeling many doubts – can frustrate, irritate, and even discourage us. They make us feel that we are never fully present. Every door that opens for us makes us see how many more doors are closed.But there is another response. These same contradictions can bring us into touch with a deeper longing, for the fulfillment of a desire that lives beneath all desires and that only God can satisfy. Contradictions, thus understood, create the friction that can help us move toward God.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
I've lived to see my longings dieI've lived to see my longings die:My dreams and I have grown apart;Now only sorrow haunts my eye,The wages of a bitter heart.Beneath the storms of hostile fate,My flowery wreath has faded fast;I live alone and sadly waitTo see when death will come at last.Just so, when the winds in winter moanAnd snow descends in frigid flakes,Upon a naked branch, alone,The final leaf of summer shakes!...
— Alexander Pushkin
While I'd been plagued by nightmares of Jonathan's unrest in the hereafter, it was only now that I'd seen Adair again—and seen him so changed—that I could admit, even to myself, that it was him I daydreamed of, who I longed for, who I ached for, physically. That was how I'd betrayed Luke—in my desire for Adair. It wasn't so uncommon, was it? Living with one man while your mind is on another? Being unable to stop thinking of this other man who, for one reason or another, was not the one sitting beside you. Thinking of the way his eyes lit up when he saw you, of his wicked smile and what it was like when he held you, how you responded to the touch of his hands. In solitary moments, you remembered the little intimacies, the feel of his skin against yours, the way he liked to be touched, the velvet nap of his member, the way he tasted. You thought of him even though you could never be with him. His absence nagged like an itch you could never scratch.
— Alma Katsu, The Descent
privation is the cause of appetite
— Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor Juana Ines de La Cruz: Selected Writings
His heat warmed her, even as her insides turned to ice.
— Katherine McIntyre, Solid Ground
But I love him.""So love him.""But I miss him.""So miss him. Send him love and light every time you think about him, and then drop it.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
It's not that I wait for you.It's that my arms are doors I cannot close.
— Derrick Brown
When we lay together, she showed me her soul, and I showed her mine, and they were the same. As you can imagine, mine was battered and bruised, tarnished like ancient metal. She scrubbed it clean. I cannot deny my own soul any more than I can deny she held it in her hands for a time.
— Carol Oates, Something Wicked
I gave up hoping...But, still, I would think of him, I would cherish his image in my mind, and treasure every word, look and gesture that memory could retain.
— Anne Brontë
The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn't know where to put it.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Love a girl and she will give you a story to tell,Love a woman and she will give you a novel to pen...
— Dinesh Kumar Biran
Some people are like swings...They give us an exciting thing to do for a while..Thereafter leave us alone, dizzy and not very far ahead in life...
— Dinesh Kumar Biran
To feel such a longing for his own life, even as he’s living it—he wonders what that means.
— David Levithan, Are We There Yet?
Sometimes, one yearns for something.For the ultimate in happiness. I yearn for it,and don't know where to look for it any longer. And I don't know if I would recognize it if I found it. And the longer I look, the more selfish I grow.For I think only of my own happiness. i think I have lost the ability to make someone else happy. If I ever had it. And I suppose we can never be happy unless we can also give happiness.
— Mary Balogh
Perhaps it is better not to tell what you wish. if you cannot have it.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin
There is a legend that everything that falls into the waters of this river -- leaves, insects, the feathers of birds -- is transformed into the rocks that make the riverbed. If only I could tear out my heart and hurl it into the current, then my pain and longing would be over, and I could finally forget.
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
There’s a time when it all comes together—what you long for and what you fear—and as tentative as you may feel, you’re driven to continue. At that point, the need to forge ahead is the only option, and your direction is defined despite yourself.
— Lorii Myers
To long to read.
— A. Cretan
Methinks I lied all winter, when I sworeMy love was infinite, if spring makes it more.
— John Donne
We fear what we long for. This is the paradox.
— Tony Brasunas, Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China
Amelie seemed to focus on her again. For a few seconds she regarded her, frowning, and then smiled just a little. "So I recall," she said. "Not all wars are waged with bullets and swords, indeed. Some are wars of wills and ideas. It's good we both remember that." The smile faded. "But not all ideas win the war, and not all wills are strong enough. Darkness can descend so easily.
— Rachel Caine, Bite Club
I’m always soft for you, that’s the problem. You could come knocking on my door five years from now and I would open my arms wider and say ‘come here, it’s been too long, it felt like home with you.
— Azra T.
Let’s call my mood melancholy; let’s call it remembrance. Or maybe let’s call it longing. Yes, let’s call it longing instead.
— Shannon Celebi, Small Town Demons
...and when he dies, cut him out in little stars, and the face of heaven will be so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no heed to the garish sun.
— William Shakespeare
Surely some revelation is at hand.
— W.B. Yeats
She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
It is poetic and lyrical
—  words that spill forth like cool waters into the dusty dry rock bed of the Soul desiring love. It has been said that I’ve lived in the desert all my life and do not know what it means to be wet.
All longings the essence for real liberation only, Freedom from all sides, an ultimate supremacy;- 43 -
— Munindra Misra, Devi Mahatmayam in English Rhyme
When we parted, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, I leaned over to give her a kiss on the cheek. ‘If you do find paradise,’ she said, turning to leave, ‘send me a grape.
— Adam Leith Gollner
In the distance,far over there, only the eyes can travel when the body is weary.
— Yvette Christiansë, Unconfessed
His heart hurt with the wanting of it, the hurt no less painful for being difficult to explain.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys
Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
If only they could listen with their hearts & not their minds, maybe then they would understand that often times it's the emotions not spoken that are longing to be heard.
— Christine Upton
[T]he radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, "The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism.
— Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
Then he lets go and walks down the path, without another word. He doesn't look back. But I watch him go. I watch him all the way home.
— Allie Condie in Matched
I thought once how Theocritus had sungOf the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,Who each one in a gracious hand appearsTo bear a gift for mortals, old or young;And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,Those of my own life, who by turns had flungA shadow across me. Straightaway I was 'ware,So weeping, how a mystic Shape did moveBehind me, and drew me backward by the hair;And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,--Guess now who holds thee?--Death, I said, But, there,The silver answer rang,--Not Death, but Love.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
Our stomachs live in towns," said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. 'That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else.
— Alexander McCall Smith
I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything.
— Jonathan Safran Foer
Time no longer mattered. He knew he would have plenty of it at his disposal. The sight of the star filled him with indescribable longing.
— J. Valor, Salome
I wanted so terribly to be good to him.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
She didn’t know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn’t know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.
— Michelle Tea, Valencia
How about this?” she retorted, her voice deceptively flirtatious, and in that small, stolen moment in his mind, he quickly spun and grasped her by the small of her back, pulled her close into to him, and made her his. And maybe she resisted at first before giving in, or maybe she didn’t—maybe she’d wanted this just as long as he had. But none of that would matter, because they would finally be together, starting at that moment and for the rest of their lives. And they would love each other and raise children and make music, and life would suddenly be worth living, and Christ, how could anyone ever throw something like that away?
— J. Tonzelli, The End of Summer: Thirteen Tales of Halloween
Oh, if only I could hurt with such misery once again, to feel the powers of love here inside my heart, the joys of heaven and the pains of hell!
— Victor Villaseñor, Rain of Gold
I felt a wave of longing roll out of me, but not the way it usually did, diffuse and sad. This was hopeful, as though it had been coaxed out by a whispered promise.
— Michele Jaffe, Ghost Flower
They should not clench their fists,it’s my longing that’s drawing me near to them;they should not stand there full of rage,my longing is timidly drawing near to them;they should not be ready to pounce like vicious dogs,as if they wanted to tear my longing to shreds;they should not threaten with broad sleeves,that pains my longing.Why have they suddenly changed?As great and deep is my longing.No matter how difficult, no matter how menacing:I must reach them and I’m already there.
— Robert Walser, Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser
What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman's direction.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
I do,” Drew admitted, his eyes devouring my body appreciatively. “But with you…I want so much more, Summer. So much more than you’re willing to give me.” He paused, “Every single touch, every single look you give me, I cherish.
— Kailin Gow, Perfect Summer
Clairey knew well that it was one thing to occupy his bed, quite another to occupy his heart.
— Tracy Winegar, Good Ground
Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.
— Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow
Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened.
— John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
It isnt for wantof something to say--something to tell you--something you should know--but to detain you--keep you from going--feeling myself hereas long as you are--as long as you are
— Cid Corman
Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible.
— Juliet Marillier, Heart's Blood
We have it in our head that if we fill our stomachs, we’ll fill our hearts.
— Kate Wicker, Weightless: Making Peace with Your Body
We clean our plates, yet we’re still famished—starving for something other than food.
— Kate Wicker, Weightless: Making Peace with Your Body
Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.
— David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
He was what the egotistical part of me had always longed for: danger, sexiness, popularity, style, unpredictability. The kind of man who'd always keep me guessing. Just one night with him and i'd already started to wonder if perhaps i'd spent the last two years in a comfortable coma.
— Lucy Robinson, The Greatest Love Story of All Time
Did you know, that one night; one moonless, clear, shining night; with the shadowy silhouettes of trees crisp against the star-filled sky – I, on the high, level terrace of my flat, stretched out my hand! Against all odds and possibilities of unbelief and grief – a life of searchings, discontent, and a nagging sense of unreality… A spider-web intuition of a spread-out, intricate illusion that wilfully withheld the truth from me.
— Radhika Mukherjee, Our Particular Shadows
I really should be studying now, but you're much more important to me than a .50 calibre machine gun.
— Kara Martinelli, My Very Dearest Anna
The whole world can't lick us but we can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven't got any more - and by remembering too much.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Witch, do this for me,Find me a moonmade of longing.Then cut it sliver thin,and having cut it,hang it highabove my beloved's house,so that she may look uptonightand see it,and seeing it, sigh for meas I sigh for her,moon or no moon.
— Clive Barker
The ocean exerts an inexorable pull over sea people wherever they are-in a bright-lit, inland city or the dead center of a desert-and when they feel the tug there is no choice but somehow to reach it and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving edge, straightaway calmed.
— Anuradha Roy, The Folded Earth
The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
— Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Oh, I wish I lived in a caravan!’ said Jimmy longingly. ‘How lovely it must be to live in a house that has wheels and can go away down the lanes and through the towns, and stand still in fields at night!
— Enid Blyton, Mr Galliano's Circus
My beloved has arrived, but rather than greeting him, All I can do is bite the corner of my apron with a blank expression- What an awkward woman am I. My heart has longed for him as hugely and openly as a full moonBut instead I narrow my eyes, and my glance to him Is sharp and narrow as the crescent moon. But then, I'm not the only one who behaves this way. My mother and my mother's mother were as silly and stumbling as I am when they were girls...Still, the love from my heart is overflowing, As bright and crimson as the heated metal in a blacksmith's forge.
— Kim Dong Hwa, The Color of Earth
He lived to near the things he loved to seem poetical.
— E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey
You speak an infinite deal of nothing.
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
These violent delights have violent endsAnd in their triump die, like fire and powderWhich, as they kiss, consume
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Conscience doth make cowards of us all.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Some are born great, others achieve greatness.
— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
All's well that ends well.
— William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well
Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
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, Hamlet
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, Macbeth
Sometimes...the hardest part about letting someone go is realizing that you were never meant to have them.
— Rebecca Serle, When You Were Mine
If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Hocus Pocus
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
The Play's the Thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves.
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
— William Shakespeare, Love Poems and Sonnets
And therefore, — since I cannot prove a lover,To entertain these fair well-spoken days, —I am determined to prove a villain,And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
— William Shakespeare, Richard III
Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.
— William Shakespeare, Othello
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, Eternal Man
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, Macbeth
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
THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD!!!!
— Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief
The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness. And in the taste destroys the appetite. Therefore, love moderately.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare said, 'the robbed that smiles steals something from the thief.
— Amy Harmon, Making Faces
You are thought here to the most senseless and fit man for the job.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
They lie deadly that tell you have good faces.
— William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
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, Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Boxset
Yet but three come one more.Two of both kinds make up four.Ere she comes curst and sad.Cupid is a knavish lad.Thus to make poor females mad.
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
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, Out for Blood
O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
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
- Be thou not technical with me,/Or else thine input valve may swift receive/a hearty helping of my golden foot.
— Ian Doescher, William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope
By my soul I swear, there is no power in the tongue of man to alter me.
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Antonio: Will you stay no longer? nor will you not that I go with you?	  Sebastian: By your patience, no. My stars shine darkly over me; the malignancy of my fate might, perhaps, distemper yours; therefore I shall crave of you your leave that I may bear my evils alone. It were a bad recompense for your love to lay any of them on you.
— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
He kills her in her own humor.
— William Shakespeare
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, Romeo and Juliet
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, Shakespeare: The World as Stage
The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
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, Julius Caesar
What if the greatest love story ever told was the wrong one?
— Rebecca Serle, When You Were Mine
And nothing is, but what is not.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!
— Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge
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, To the Lighthouse
My Crown is in my heart, not on my head:Not deck'd with Diamonds, and Indian stones:Nor to be seen: my Crown is call'd Content,A Crown it is, that seldom Kings enjoy.
— William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 3
Oh, Blimey O'Riley's pantyhose....What is the point of Shakespeare? I know he is a genius and so on, but he does rave on. 'What light doth through yonder window break?' It's the bloody moon, for God sake, Will, get a grip!
— Louise Rennison, Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants
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, Henry V
If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.
— William Shakespeare
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
Shakespeare's great."Duh. Shakespeare's cool, man.
— Alex Flinn, Beastly
-No, I am thy father.
— Ian Doescher, William Shakespeare's The Empire Striketh Back
I can call spirits from the vasty deep."Why so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?
— William Shakespeare
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, Money
Oh, if Shakespeare says it, that's all right.
— L. Frank Baum, The Master Key
They are the books, the arts, the academes,That show, contain and nourish all the world.
— William Shakespeare
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, The Wednesday Wars
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
But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
There is this quote that I read a long time ago. A quote that I loved and made me feel strong. It had stuck with me over the years, like so many of the other words by the a
— Cambria Hebert, #Hater
I wrote you this poem because i was afraid/ To come out and tell you i want to get laid.
— Jake Wizner
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, Long Day's Journey Into Night
Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.
— Ray Bradbury
And now to sleep, to dream...perchance to fart.
— Anthony Bourdain
It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
— Karen Blixen
You can't go by what a girl says, when she's giving you the devil for making a chump of yourself. It's like Shakespeare. Sounds well, but doesn't mean anything.
— P.G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning
Thou wouldst as soon go kindle fire with snow as seek to quench the fire of love with words.
— William Shakespeare
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause
— William Shakespeare
(...)we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.
— Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as Stage
To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand yearsWill Hardly leach,” he thought, “this dust of that fire.
— Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems
. . . 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
If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN born in a rude age and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy; if represented as a POET capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionated scenes intermixed with them; and, at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties on account of their being surrounded by such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a single character, he frequently hits, as it were, by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions as well as descriptions abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect, yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. [....] And there may even remain a suspicion that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen.
— David Hume
How much easier it is to be poor than rich.
— Lois Leveen, Juliet's Nurse
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, William Shakespeare
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, The Two Gentlemen of Verona
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
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, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes
Everybody needs a career manager."- Lady Macbeth
— Robert Lynn Asprin, Myth-ing Persons
What do you do when the alienating silence deafens your 'bootless cries'?
— Solange nicole
Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.
— Peter Porter
Hamlet' dwarfs 'Hamilton' - it dwarfs pretty much everything - but there's a revealing similarity between them. Shakespeare's longest play leaves its audience in the dark about some basic and seemingly crucial facts. It's not as if the Bard forgot, in the course of all those words, to tell us whether Hamlet was crazy or only pretending: He wanted us to wonder. He forces us to work on a puzzle that has no definite answer. And this mysteriousness is one reason why we find the play irresistible. 'Hamilton' is riddled with question marks. The first act begins with a question, and so does the second. The entire relationship between Hamilton and Burr is based on a mutual and explicit lack of comprehension: 'I will never understand you,' says Hamilton, and Burr wonders, 'What it is like in his shoes?' Again and again, Lin distinguishes characters by what they wish they knew. 'What'd I miss?' asks Jefferson in the song that introduces him. 'Would that be enough?' asks Eliza in the song that defines her. 'Why do you write like you're running out of time?' asks everybody in a song that marvels at Hamilton's drive, and all but declares that there's no way to explain it. 'Hamilton', like 'Hamlet', gives an audience the chance to watch a bunch of conspicuously intelligent and well-spoken characters fill the stage with 'words, words, words,' only to discover, again and again, the limits to what they can comprehend.
— Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter
She is drowned already, sir, with salt water, though I seem to drown her remembrance again with more.
— William Shakespeare
We now doubt Aristotle, understand Shakespeare only with footnotes.
— Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning
A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.
— Harold Bloom
About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.
— T.S. Eliot, Essays On Elizabethan Drama
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten’?” He laughed again. “Racine has his moments, sure, but you can’t beat Shakespeare for the really grisly stuff.
— Adam Roberts, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under The Sea
-Gardener: ...Go thou, and like an executioner,Cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays,That look too lofty in our commonwealth:All must be even in our government.You thus employ'd, I will go root awayThe noisome weeds, which without profit suckThe soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.+Servant:Why should we in the compass of a paleKeep law and form and due proportion,Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,Her fruit-trees all upturned, her hedges ruin'd,Her knots disorder'd and her wholesome herbsSwarming with caterpillars?-Gardener:Hold thy peace! He that hath suffer'd this disorder'd springHath now himself met with the fall of leaf.,,
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
It’s the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.
— Amanda Craig, Love in Idleness
Pleasure and revenge have ears more deaf than adders to the voice of any true decision.
— William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.
— George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.Richard loves Richard; that is, I and I.
— William Shakespeare, Richard III
Celebrate the Ides of March but remember your own warnings less as Caesar learned, you can get killed in many ways
— Phillip Gary Smith, HARMONIZING: Keys to Living in the Song of Life
As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Johnson, or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead, you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that you will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare's words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors' deliveries and notice the audience's reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery; Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his Hamlet. But what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse, they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words. If they pause to emphasize the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.
— Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England
[Act 5, Scene 4, ROSALIND] If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
If I could write the beauty of your eyesAnd in fresh numbers number all your graces,The age to come would say 'this poet lies! Such heaven never touched earthly faces
— William Shakespeare
Must I observe you? Must I stand & crouchUnder your testy humour? By the gods, You shall digest the venom ofyour spleen,Though it do split you, for, from thisday forth, I'll use you for my mirth, yea,for my laughter, when you are waspish.
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets the its indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.
— Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
[Shakespeare} the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
No, take more! What may be sworn by, both divine and human, Seal what I end withal! This double worship, Where [one] part does disdain with cause, the other Insult without all reason; where gentry, title, wisdom, Cannot conclude but by the yea and no Of general ignorance— it must omit Real necessities, and give way the while To unstable slightness. Purpose so barr’d, it follows Nothing is done to purpose. Therefore beseech you— You that will be less fearful than discreet; That love the fundamental part of state More than you doubt the change on’t; that prefer A noble life before a long, and wish To jump a body with a dangerous physic That’s sure of death without it— at once pluck out The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick The sweet which is their poison. Your dishonor Mangles true judgment, and bereaves the state Of that integrity which should become’t; Not having the power to do the good it would, For th’ ill which doth control’t.
— William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
Turn hell-hound, turn.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.
— Harold Bloom
How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love hath reason, Reason none, If what parts, can so remain.
— William Shakespeare, The Phoenix and the Turtle
Timon: I’ll beat thee, but I should infect my hands.
— William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
Timon: Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon!
— William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
O mother, mother!What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,The gods look down, and this unnatural sceneThey laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!You have won a happy victory to Rome;But, for your son,--believe it, O, believe it,Most dangerously you have with him prevail'd,If not most mortal to him.
— William Shakespeare
Tis like she comes to speak of Cassio’s death,The noise was high. Ha! No more moving?Still as the grave. Shall she come in? Were ’t good?I think she stirs again—No. What’s best to do?If she come in, she’ll sure speak to my wife—My wife! my wife! what wife? I have no wife.Oh, insupportable! Oh, heavy hour!Methinks it should be now a huge eclipseOf sun and moon, and that th' affrighted globeShould yawn at alteration.
— William Shakespeare, Othello
Heavy is the head that wears the crownWilliam Shakespeare
— Charmaine J. Forde
Walter looked like he could chew nails and still come back for a helping of chain link fence. “Why can’t Romeo and Juliet meet in a garden like in Downton Abbey?” Romeo asked. “I mean who meets on a balcony? How real is that?
— Suzanne M. Trauth, Show Time
What sad, short lives humans live! Each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! Tut-tut, and all that.
— Stephen King, It
Let not thy sorrow die, though i am dead.
— Wililam Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
I’ll prove the prettier fellow of the two and wear my dagger with the braver grace
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
The rest is silence.
— William Shakespeare
I can say little more than I have studied, and that question's out of my part.
— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Then the conceit of this inconstant staySets you rich in youth before my sight,Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,To change your day of youth to sullied night;And all in war with Time for love of you,As he takes from you I engraft you new.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
All men die in solitude
—  all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me
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, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Othello is about many different kinds of love: it’s about the light, beautiful side of love, and it’s about the twisted, darker side of love, and it’s about how, if you flip the emotional coin, love can make you do terrible things. (James Earl Jones)
— Susannah Carson, Living with Shakespeare: Actors, Directors, and Writers on Shakespeare in Our Time
And shake the yoke of inauspicious starsFrom this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
— William Shakespeare
For all that beauty that doth cover theeIs but the seemly raiment of my heart,Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me.How can I then be elder than thou art?
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
To give yourself away keep yourself still,And you must live drawn by your own sweet skill.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,And, constant stars, in them I read such art,As truth and beauty shall together thriveIf from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;Or else of thee I prognosticate,Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
Then, were not summer's distillation leftA liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
Then of thy beauty do I question make,That thou among the wastes of time must go,Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,And die as fast as they see others grow.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
William Shakespeare...was baptized on April 26, 1564. When he was born is disputed, but anyone who argues that it was after this date is just being difficult.
— Richard Armour, The Classics Reclassified
Very few of us relate to what it's like to be a hero. But everyone understands what it's like to fail.
— Kathleen Tessaro, Innocence: A Novel
Fear no more the heat o' the sun,Nor the furious winter's rages;
— William Shakespeare
I have more care to staythan will to go.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness,And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humour.He that knows better how to tame a shrew,Now let him speak. 'Tis charity to show.
— William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
She vied so fast, protesting oath after oath,that in a twink she won me to her love.O, you are novices. 'Tis a world to seeHow tame, when men and women are alone,A meacock wretch can make the curstest shrew.
— William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
Beatrice: I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks you.Benedick: What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
BEROWNE: What time o' day?ROSALINE: The hour that fools should ask.
— William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost
By this reckoning he is more a shrew than she.
— William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
For I am born to tame you, Kate,And bring you from a wild Kate to a KateComfortable as other household Kates.
— William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
Of all matches never was the like.
— William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
I say there is no darkness but ignorance," said William Shakespeare. How would he know, he knew everything?
— Brian Spellman, If the mind fits, shrink it
Mother, I will look to like. If looking liking moves.
— William Shakespeare