c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Shrugging, I glanced at Judd who was watching someone in the corner. When I looked back at Cooper, he was studying the hair in my eyes. “You look tired,” he said, reaching out to brush away the hair. Cooper’s hand never reached my face before Judd grabbed his wrist and yanked it away. In that instant, everything shifted. The men stepped closer, eyeballing each other as the heat of their anger became palatable. I thought to step between them and calm things before violence broke out. Then, I remembered when I tried to break up a fight between my uncle’s dogs. If Farah hadn’t pulled me out of the way, I’d have been mauled. That day, I learned if predators wanted to fight, you let them while staying as far back as possible. “I’ll let this go because it’s your woman,” Cooper muttered, dark eyes still angry. “If you pull this shit again and it’s not your woman, you and I will have a problem.” Once Cooper walked away, Judd finally relaxed. I just stared at him as he led me to a booth because a group of old timers were at his table. Sitting next to him, I caressed his face, soothing him. He finally gave me a little grin. Suddenly, Vaughn appeared and took the spot across from us. “Why do you look so pissed off?” “He almost went feral on Cooper for trying to touch me.” Vaughn gave us a lazy grin. “So losing his balls makes a man stupid, eh? Good to know. Just another reason to keep mine attached.” Judd exhaled hard. “You wouldn’t want anyone touching your woman. One day, you’ll know that despite your love affair with your balls.” “A man should love his balls,” Vaughn said, still grinning. “What if I touch her?” he asked, his hand moving slowly towards my face. “I’ll stab you in the fucking eye.” Grinning, Vaughn put down his hand. “You’re pretty damn sexy when you go drama queen, O’Keefe.” “He is, isn’t he?” I said, sliding closer to Judd. “I wish we were naked right now.” Both men frowned at me, but I only smiled and Judd adjusted in the booth as his jeans grew too tight. “Stop,” he warned. “I’m not afraid of you.” “I could make a liar of you.” “You won’t though because you wish you were inside me.” Judd exhaled hard like a pissed bull and adjusted in the booth again. I just laughed and rested my head against his shoulder. “I so own you.” Vaughn nodded. “He’s a keeper. I remember how poetic he was when I asked him if he could imagine himself as an old man. He turned to me and grunted. Real profound grunt too. Oh, and once I asked if he ever imagined himself as a father. I kid you not, he burped. The man is fucking Shakespeare.
— Bijou Hunter, Damaged and the Knight
They are but beggars that can count their worth
—  But my true love is grown to such excess I cannot sum up half of my wealth.
Your honour's players, hearing your amendment, Are come to play a pleasant comedy,For so your doctors hold it very meet,Seeing too much sadness hath congealed your blood,And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.Therefore they thought it good you hear a play,And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,Which bars a thousand harms and lenghtens life.
— William Shakespeare
I have drunk,and seen the spider."(Leontine, Act II Scene I)
— William Shakespeare
Benedick: I protest I love thee.Beatrice: Why, then, God forgive me!Benedick: What offence, sweet Beatrice?Beatrice: You have stayed me in a happy hour: I was about toprotest I loved you.Benedick: And do it with all thy heart.Beatrice: I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.
— William Shakespeare
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:They are the ground, the books, the academes,From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.
— William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost
We number nothing that we spend for you;Our duty is so rich, so infinite,That we may do it still without accompt.Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,That we, like savages, may worship it.
— William Shakespeare
I’ve attempted to bring together as many perspectives as possible, not in order to be exhaustive–but to celebrate the many different approaches to appreciating Shakespeare that there are possible
— Susannah Carson, Living with Shakespeare: Actors, Directors, and Writers on Shakespeare in Our Time
Prospero, you are the master of illusion.Lying is your trademark.And you have lied so much to me(Lied about the world, lied about me)That you have ended by imposing on meAn image of myself.Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,That s the way you have forced me to see myselfI detest that image! What’s more, it’s a lie!But now I know you, you old cancer,And I know myself as well.
— Aimé Césaire, A Tempest
But, masters, remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.
— Dogberry
But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out.
— Walter Scott
Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use.
— Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship
Be not lost So poorly in your thoughts.
— William Shakespeare
There's nothing wicked in Shakespeare, and if there is I don't want to know it.
— Emily Dickinson
There is no higher or purer pleasure than to sit with closed eyes and hear a naturally expressive voice recite... a play of Shakespeare's.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
LXXVSo are you to my thoughts as food to life,Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground;And for the peace of you I hold such strifeAs 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found.Now proud as an enjoyer, and anonDoubting the filching age will steal his treasure;Now counting best to be with you alone,Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure:Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,And by and by clean starved for a look;Possessing or pursuing no delightSave what is had, or must from you be took. Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day, Or gluttoning on all, or all away.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
To be, or not to be: that is the question. That’s from Hamlet’s - maybe Shakespeare’s - most famous soliloquy. […] But what if Shakespeare - and Hamlet - were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?
— Gayle Forman, Just One Day
For Dickinson as part of a middle-class community anxious about female creativity, self-assertion, self-expression, and egoism, Shakespeare and Stratford may have been emblems appropriate to her own task as a writer: to achieve literary renown but also authorial disappearance.
— Paraic Finnerty, Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare
Would it help,” he asked gently, “to have a shoulder to cry on?” She fought to conceal how much the question unnerved her. “Thank you, but no.” Carefully she dropped the herbs into the kettle. “Crying is a waste of time.” “‘ To weep is to make less the depth of grief.’” “Is that a Romany saying?” “Shakespeare.
— Lisa Kleypas, Mine Till Midnight
My mother spoke to me this morning, she told me that my father is beginning to think of suitors for me to marry.
— Emily Whitaker, Benvolio
To be or not to be what exactly?
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
The ultimate paradox, of course, is that even though we're all going to die, we've all got to live in the meantime…
— Brian Cox
Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die,Take him and cut him out in little stars,And he will make the face of heaven so fineThat all the world will be in love with nightAnd pay no worship to the garish sun.
— William Shakespeare
Weaving spiders, come not here, Hence, you long legged spinners, hence! Beetles black, approach not here, worm nor snail, do no offense.
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
I guess I ought to be aware of what to look for, is all. The signs of true love, I mean. Is it like Shakespeare?" I sat up and took Tootsie's hands. "You know, is it all heaving bosoms and fluttering hearts and mistaken identities and madness?"The sound of the phone ringing downstairs made my heart leap."Yes," Tootsie said with wide eyes, holding tightly to my hand as I jumped up. "Yes, it is exactly like that.
— Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
During the Government’s recent overhaul of GCSEs, I was asked to join a consultative group advising on the English Literature syllabus. It quickly became clear that the minister wanted to prescribe two Shakespeare plays for every 16-year-old in the land. I argued, to the contrary, that there should be one Shakespeare play and one play by anybody except Shakespeare. It cannot be in Shakespeare’s interest for teenagers to associate him with compulsion, for his plays and his alone to have the dreaded status of set books.
— Jonathan Bate
Werewolves and silver bullets!” Shakespeare coughed a quick laugh and shook his head. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!
— Michael Scott, The Sorceress
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest.
— William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2
There is more in the world than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Doctor - or in the Merck Manual.
— Douglas Preston, Brimstone
I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.
— Laura Bates
For this last, Before and in Corioli, let me say, I cannot speak him home: he stopp'd the fliers; And by his rare example made the coward Turn terror into sport: as weeds before A vessel under sail, so men obey'd And fell below his stem: his sword, death's stamp, Where it did mark, it took; from face to foot He was a thing of blood, whose every motion Was timed with dying cries: alone he enter'd The mortal gate of the city, which he painted With shunless destiny; aidless came off, And with a sudden reinforcement struck Corioli like a planet: now all's his: When, by and by, the din of war gan pierce His ready sense; then straight his doubled spirit Re-quicken'd what in flesh was fatigate, And to the battle came he; where he did Run reeking o'er the lives of men, as if 'Twere a perpetual spoil: and till we call'd Both field and city ours, he never stood To ease his breast with panting.
— William Shakespeare
I gave you all!" screeched Lear, waving a palsied claw at Regan."And you took your bloody time giving it, too, you senile old fuck," said Regan.
— Christopher Moore, Fool
Nay, Nay! Try thou not.But do thou or do thou not, For there is no "try.
— Ian Doescher
So Shakespeare stole
—  but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He's like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.
Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.
— Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
Go, prick thy face and over-red thy fear,Thou lily-livered boy.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Impressive, most impressive, worthy lad,Thine Obi-Wan hath taught thee well, and thouHast master'd all thy fears. Now, go! ReleaseThine anger, for thy hate alone can strikeMe down!
— Ian Doescher, William Shakespeare's The Empire Striketh Back
For where Love reigns, disturbing JealousyDoth call himself Affection's sentinel;Gives false alarms, suggesteth mutiny,And in a peaceful hour doth cry 'Kill, kill!
— Venus and Adonis William Shakespeare
You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.
— Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a 
— William Hazlitt
The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.
— Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"]
— William Hazlitt
O Luke, I would not lose thee as I lostDarth Vader. His betrayal made my lifeA bleak and tragic thing. Thy loss untoThe dark would make my death a hellish, coldEternity.
— Ian Doescher
Of all mad matches never was the likeBeing mad herself, she’s madly mated.
— William Shakespeare
The wren goes to't
— Emily St. John Mandel
to pee or not to pee that is the question
— lucy fieldinghouse
It is gaol that finally reveals to me the beauty of Shakespeare, the spirit in his words, the jaw-dropping audacity of his language.
— Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda
This place looks like the last scene in Hamlet.
— Patricia Briggs, On the Prowl
I know Verona as I do my own body.
— Lois Leveen, Juliet's Nurse
To be and not to be, that is the quantum question
— Dean Cavanagh
Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, it its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself.
— Virginia Woolf
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy
— Julia Gregson, East of the Sun
The English language [during the Elizabethan era] wasn't standardized. There were no official dictionaries. There was no cultural belief that words should always be spelled the same way. So people spelled things however they heard them or however made sense. I mean the name Shakespeare had something like 16 different spellings, and the way he spelled it isn't the way we spell it.- School of Night - pg 44
— Bayard Louis
By the time you have a platform for saying what you want, you’ve already become part of the system. It’s how it works.
— Ingela Bohm, Rival Poet
The curse of true love never did run smooth.
— William Shakespeare
That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Night
Men from children nothing differ.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Get you gone, you dwarf,You minimus of hindering knotgrass made,You bead, you acorn!
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Weigh oath with oath, and you will nothing weigh,Your vows to her and me, put in two scales,Will even weigh, and both as light as tales.
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Brief as the lightning in the collied night;That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and Earth,And ere a man hath power to say "Behold!"The jaws of darkness do devour it up.So quick bright things come to confusion.
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
They say an old man is twice a child
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
To sue to live, I find I seek to die; And, seeking death, find life.
— William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
The fiend gives the more friendly counsel.
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,Knew you not Pompey?
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Why do people who read Shakespeare still spend hours watching shitty TV or staring out of the window or arguing about whose dinner party to go to?
— Glen Duncan, By Blood We Live
Mad I call it, for to define true madness, what is't to be nothing else but mad?
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Alack, when once our grace we have forgot,Nothing goes right; we would and we would not.
— William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
A condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.
— John Connolly, The Wolf in Winter
Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view.And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone.When you look up the stage directions, it says, ‘Exit Ariel.
— Tom Stoppard
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
He does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural.
— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
In my mind's eye
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet
— William Shakespeare
You are full of pretty answers. Have you not been acquainted with goldsmiths' wives and conned them out of rings?
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Real love is booty grabbin
— Janey McGregor
Nernst was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and it is said that in a conference concerned with naming units after appropriate persons, he proposed that the unit of rate of liquid flow should be called the falstaff.
— J.R. Partington
If it were possible for a metaphysician to be a golfer, he might perhaps occasionally notice that his ball, instead of moving forward in a vertical plane (like the generality of projectiles, such as brickbats and cricket balls), skewed away gradually to the right. If he did notice it, his methods would naturally lead him to content himself with his caddies's remark-'ye heeled that yin,' or 'Ye jist sliced it.' ... But a scientific man is not to be put off with such flimsy verbiage as that. He must know more. What is 'Heeling', what is 'slicing', and why would either operation (if it could be thoroughly carried out) send a ball as if to cover point, thence to long slip, and finally behind back-stop? These, as Falstaff said, are 'questions to be asked.
— Peter Guthrie Tait
We've been told that with regard to seduction, "candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker," but in truth, rather, properly selected: "candy makes randy; liquor makes desire flicker"; or, as Shakespeare's porter said to Macduff: "[drink] provokes the desire but it takes away the performance." The wines and beers of antiquity, however, which were potent infusions of innumerable psychoactive plants, often requiring dilution with water and in which alcohol served rather as preservative then inebriating active principle.
— Rick Doblin, Manifesting Minds: A Review of Psychedelics in Science, Medicine, Sex, and Spirituality
Here comes a pair of very strange beast, which in all tongues are called "fools".
— Bill Shakespeare
It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods
—  To tell them that this world did equal theirs Till they had stolen our jewel.
I have ridden out all the storms,” said Shakespeare, “even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…
— Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate
Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. “I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate
Shakespeare,” he thought as he scribbled away. “Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate
JAQUES: Rosalind is your love's name?ORLANDO: Yes, just.JAQUES: I do not like her name.ORLANDO: There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.
— E.M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady
Shakespeare had it right all along: Love will kill you in the end.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Hang there like a fruit, my soul, Till the tree die!-Posthumus LeonatusAct V, Scene V
— William Shakespeare, Cymbeline
Into the breach, then. Against mobs of middle-aged moms and frightening harridans we shall prevail.”She nodded sharply, raising an invisible sword. “And damned be he—she—who cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”“Misquote Shakespeare in front of Samuel, I dare you,” I told her, and she laughed.
— Patricia Briggs, Frost Burned
Hark,” he said, his tone very dry. “What stone through yonder window breaks?”Kami yelled up at him, “It is the east, and Juliet is a jerk!
— Sarah Rees Brennan, Unspoken
You can quiz me on Petrarch, Medea, Shakespeare or Dante, I know them all, and I’m sorry, but they’ve all gone wrong. Dumb glorified men, writing words about love and life as if they knew. As far as I’m concerned, they didn’t make it out alive either, so I’m sure as hell not going to go to them for advice.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
Women may fail when there is no strength in man
— William Shakespeare
Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.
— Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
You gotta be cruel to be kind.
— William Shakespeare
Diseases desperate grown,By desperate appliance are relieved,Or not at all.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
If the distinction is not held too rigidly nor pressed too far, it is interesting to think of Shakespeare's chief works as either love dramas or power dramas, or a combination of the two. In his Histories, the poet handles the power problem primarily, the love interest being decidedly incidental. In the Comedies, it is the other way around, overwhelmingly in the lighter ones, distinctly in the graver ones, except in Troilus and Cressida--hardly comedy at all--where without full integration something like a balance is maintained. In the Tragedies both interests are important, but Othello is decidedly a love drama and Macbeth as clearly a power drama, while in Hamlet and King Lear the two interests often alternate rather than blend.
— Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 2
Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you'd better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too.
— Elizabeth Knox, Mortal Fire
Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fairTo be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
Brutus: Kneel not, gentle Portia.Portia: I should need not, if you were gentle Brutus. Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus, Is it excepted I should know no secrets That appertain to you? Am I yourself But, as it were, in sort or limitation, To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed, And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs Of your good pleasure? If it be no more, Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife.
— William Shakespeare
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, Much Ado About Nothing
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
— John Irving, In One Person
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, Lunch Poems
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, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale
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, Julius Caesar
Friar Laurence:O, mickle is the powerful grace that liesIn herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities: For nought to vile that on the earth doth live, But to the earth some special good doth give; nor aught so good, but, strain'd from that fair use, Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse: Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime's by action dignified.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
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 M. Mason
My love is as a fever, longing stillFor that which longer nurseth the disease;Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,The uncertain sickly appetite to please.My reason, the physician to my love,Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,Hath left me, and I desperate now approve,Desire his death, which physic did except.Past cure I am, now reason is past care,And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,At random from the truth vainly express'd;For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
— William Shakespeare
Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment's apotheosis.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
By the power of the Tri-Force, I command you to "-------
— Prashna Bari
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, Brave New World
...I love Shakespeare, but sometimes....his images - If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head....
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
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, The Dyer's Hand
n sooth, I know not why I am so sad:It wearies me; you say it wearies you;But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,I am to learn;And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,That I have much ado to know myself.
— William Shakespeare
Ram. My lord constable, the armor that I saw in your tent to-night, are those stars or suns upon it?Con. Stars, my lord.Dau. Some of them will fall to-morrow, I hope.Con. And yet my sky shall not want.Dau. That may be, for you bear a many superfluously, and ’twere more honor some were away.Con. Even as your horse bears your praises; who would trot as well, were some of your brags dismounted.Henry V, 3.7.69-78
— William Shakespeare
All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare
— Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths:  Selected Stories and Other Writings
No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
— Harold Bloom
Lucentio: 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, The Taming of the Shrew
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, Brave New World
[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.
— Michael D. O'Brien, Island of the World
I think he'll be to Rome as is the osprey to the fish, who takes it by sovereignty of nature.
— William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!
— Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
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, Having Decided To Stay
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, Thinking in Numbers: How Maths Illuminates Our Lives
Books are Lighthouses erected in the sea of time." Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest
— Alex St. Clair
No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.
— Harold Bloom
Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.
— Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare
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, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare
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, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare
Usually, Shakespeare gives me goose bumps. The guy knows everything. Like some ancient angel quill-ing out blueprints life. Hiding it in fiction. And usually I love the sound of the words, the way they dance on the page. Today, they fall flat. My attention bobbing in the cosmos. All free brain-space is marinating in gap month fizz. I chew my pen, candy-cane style. The million possibilities ahead make it hard to care about right now. I write my answers slowly, each letter carved in stone not ballpoint. I’m going to explore the world, find my passion, try everything! The fizz shoots up my spine and a smile sprouts.
— Jolene Stockman, The Jelly Bean Crisis
O ill-starred wench! Pale as your smock!
— William Shakespeare, Othello
Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.
— James Shapiro
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, A Midsummer Night's Dream
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, Very Good, Jeeves!
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
— William Shakespeare
Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.
— Antony Sher, Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook
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, Necropolis: London and Its Dead
More grief to hide than hate to utter love. Polonius, Hamlet.
— William Shakespeare
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, Die Laughing: War Humour From WW1 To Present Day
[Measure for Measure] leaves me with the sense that life is all there is, so we might as well live it as best we can; that being human is not a given something we have to strive for. That the reason we are here is to live and that this involves making many difficult judgements.
— Roger Allam, Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company
I began to recall my own experience when I was Mercutio’s age (late teens I decided, a year or two older than Romeo) as a pupil at a public school called Christ’s Hospital. This school is situated in the idyllic countryside of the Sussex Weald, just outside Horsham. I recalled the strange blend of raucousness and intellect amongst the cloisters, the fighting, the sport, and general sense of rebelliousness, of not wishing to seem conventional (this was the sixties); in the sixth form (we were called Grecians) the rarefied atmosphere, the assumption that of course we would go to Oxford or Cambridge; the adoption of an ascetic style, of Zen Buddhism, of baroque opera, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Mahler; of Pound, Eliot and e. e. cummings. We perceived the world completely through art and culture. We were very young, very wise, and possessed of a kind of innocent cynicism. We wore yellow stockings, knee breeches, and an ankle length dark blue coat, with silver buttons. We had read Proust, we had read Evelyn Waugh, we knew what was what. There was a sense, fostered by us and by many teachers, that we were already up there with Lamb, Coleridge, and all the other great men who had been educated there. We certainly thought that we soared ‘above a common bound’. I suppose it is a process of constant mythologizing that is attempted at any public school. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a good example. Girls were objects of both romantic and purely sexual, fantasy; beautiful, distant, mysterious, unobtainable, and, quite simply, not there. The real vessel for emotional exchange, whether sexually expressed or not, were our own intense friendships with each other. The process of my perceptions of Mercutio intermingling with my emotional memory continued intermittently, up to and including rehearsals. I am now aware that that possibly I re-constructed my memory somewhat, mythologised it even, excising what was irrelevant, emphasising what was useful, to accord with how I was beginning to see the part, and what I wanted to express with it. What I was seeing in Mercutio was his grief and pain at impending separation from Romeo, so I suppose I sensitised myself to that period of my life when male bonding was at its strongest for me.
— Roger Allam, Players of Shakespeare 2: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
— Seneca
Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, ....whence it becomes expedient for promoting the publick happiness that those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or accidental condition of circumstance.
— Thomas Jefferson, Writings: Autobiography/Notes on the State of Virginia/Public & Private Papers/Addresses/Letters
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
— Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True
To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism.
— G. Edward Griffin
Innocence eroded into nightmare.All because of very bad touch.Love, corrupted.
— Ellen Hopkins, Fallout
It is true that nobody is above the law,but power can make somebody invisible.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as 'the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.' But the main problem, alas, remained the same. In Edward's moral universe, Arafat could at last be named as a thug and a practitioner of corruption and extortion. But he could only be identified as such to the extent that he was now and at last aligned with an American design. Thus the only truly unpardonable thing about 'The Chairman' was his readiness to appear on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton in 1993. I have real knowledge and memory of this, because George Stephanopoulos—whose father's Orthodox church in Ohio and New York had kept him in touch with what was still a predominantly Christian Arab-American opinion—called me more than once from the White House to help beseech Edward to show up at the event. 'The feedback we get from Arab-American voters is this: If it's such a great idea, why isn't Said signing off on it?' When I called him, Edward was grudging and crabby. 'The old man [Arafat] has no right to sign away land.' Really? Then what had the Algiers deal been all about? How could two states come into being without mutual concessions on territory?
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
An assassin can be found for every president. And for every prophet there are a thousand interpreters to distort the essence of the religion, to replace the bright flame with the heat of the inquisitors' pyres. The time came when every book was cast into the fire, when every symphony was reduced to a popular tune and played in all the drinking dens. A sound philosophical basis could be set in place under any vile nonsense.
— Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch
All the things of the wild have their proper uses. Only misuse makes them evil.
— Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many
If you're patriotic, stand up for the Bill of Rights because once they strip your rights from you, you will pay hell to get them back. You will and we're in the process of it right now.
— Jesse Ventura
I know he is--sensitive--on some points, Detective, but you must bear in mind how hard it is for an honest man to do his work in relative obscurity, while dishonest men attain wealth and renown. That is why corruption is so pernicious. It breaks the will of good men.
— Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder
If corruption had already taken root, then good seeds must be preserved.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
... there is nothing under the moon, however fine, that is not subject to corruption.
— C.J. Sansom, Dark Fire
Don't let cycles of violent crimes, uncontrollable, rising cases of bloody impunity, evil puppets in a crippled judiciary, marionettes in a corrupted legislative system manipulated by a fascist executive system and its annihilative corruption be the incurable epidemics of the disintegration of the environmental, emotional, social, intellectual, physical, professional, occupational, moral and ethical destruction of your homeland. ~ Angelica Hopes, K.H. Trilogy
— Angelica Hopes
There are people who thirst for blood like tigers. Any man who has once tasted this unlimited power over the blood, over the body and spirit of a human creature like himself, a creature created in the same image and subject to the same law of Christ; any man who has tasted this power, this boundless opportunity to humiliate most bitterly another being made in the image of God — becomes the servant instead of the master of his own emotions. Tyranny is a habit. It can and does eventually develop into a disease. I believe that the best of men may grow coarse, degrade to the level of a beast by sheer force of habit. Blood and power intoxicate one, they develop callousness and lust. The greatest perversions grow finally acceptable and even delicious to mind and heart. The man and the citizen perish in the tyrant for ever and the return to human dignity, remorse and spiritual rebirth becomes scarcely possible to him. Besides, the example and mere possibility of arbitrary power are contagious; they are indeed a great temptation. A society which regards such things calmly is already corrupt at the roots.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead
The bigger the corporation, the bigger the corruption. The more invisible the corporation, the more malicious it is.
— Mango Wodzak, The Eden Fruitarian Guidebook
We can't just sit on our asses and not live our lives while we're trying to expose a corrupt government.
— C.B. Lee, Not Your Sidekick
The word corruption does not arouse the moral revulsion that it should. We think of it as more a nuisance than a great evil. But corruption kills societies every bit as much as murder kills an individual. Moreover there is no hope for any society in which corruption is endemic. One final thought: Here in Cameroon, as elsewhere in Africa, the knowledgeable guides who lead tours of the slave centers note that Africans were deeply involved in the slave trade, and that without them, the slave trade could not have existed. If only this fact were taught as readily in American universities as it is here in Africa — not in order to minimize white complicity, but because universities should teach truth. Flawed human nature has no color.
— Dennis Prager, Dennis Prager: Volume I
The bourgeoisie are today evading taxation by bribery and through their connections
—  we must close all loopholes.
Clinton leaned in close, breath stinking. “I’m a well-compensated lawman, Reb. Let’s leave it at that. You’ll never prove anything else.”	“You’re no lawman. You are a whore,” Tom growled.
— C.G. Faulkner, Unreconstructed
When we pray for miracles to everyone or everybody, we are spreading corruption through the pulpit.
— Sunday Adelaja
The gospel of miracle that we preach promotes death and encourages corruption.
— Sunday Adelaja
The corrupt begat corruption.
— Steven Magee
doctors & druggists wash each other's hands
— Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
if the roots are corrupt, no worthy fruits may erupt
— Priyavrat Thareja
In the corrupted currents of this worldOffence's gilded hand may shove by justice,And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itselfBuys out the law. . . (Claudius, from Hamlet, Act 3, scene 3)
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
The depths cleared again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless languor, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. It broke surface casually, lightly, without haste. I saw wool, sodden and black, a leather jerkin blacker than ink, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes and something that bulged nastily between the shoes and the cuffs of the slacks. I saw a wave of dark blond hair straighten out in the water and hold still for a brief instant as if with a calculated effect, and then swirl into a tangle again.
— Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake
Corruption is the abuse of power and position. Corrupts have bad habits and values. Become rigid and don't pay any bribe. If it is require to complain at the appropriate level, do that.
— Anjan Dey
Corrupts are in complete greed of money. They have no compassion for the fellow citizens. We all need to fight against this evil to eradicate corruption completely from this nation.
— Anjan Dey
Every time there's elections, we hand out cash. Usually to both sides, but this time the government is going to win for sure. The opposition is in a total mess. So we just have to pay off the government, which is good for us.
— Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
In Nigeria we must have the dream, believe the dream, live the dream and work to build the dream and then live corruption.
— Saminu Kanti
Another word for corruption is injustice.
— Auliq-Ice
All governments are corrupt and only thing that varies between them is the level of corruption.
— Steven Magee
Laws are make to be broken, but when you brake them, you either pay with money or with your freedom"Beta
— Beta Metani' Marashi
Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope
— George Orwell