"O God! methinks, it were a happy life, To be no better than a homely swain; To sit upon a hill, as I do now, To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, Thereby to see the minutes how they run: How many make the hour full complete, How many hours bring about the day, How many days will finish up the year, How many years a mortal man may live."

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones."

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

"The fox barks not, when he would steal the lamb."

"Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and, contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill."

"Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends."

"She's beautiful, and therefore to be woo'd; She is a woman, therefore to be won."

"Off with his head!"

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts."

"The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on."

"I was in love with my bed."

"Is she not passing fair?"

"Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare To digg the dust encloased heare Blese be the man that spares these stones And curst be he that moves my bones"

"Crabbed age and youth cannot live together: Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care"

"I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture"

"How use doth breed a habit in a man!"

"On a day — alack the day! — Love, whose month is ever May, Spied a blossom passing fair Playing in the wanton air"

"What cannot be eschewed must be embraced"

"Beauty itself doth of itself persuade The eyes of men without an orator."

"Time's glory is to calm contending kings, To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light."

"A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

"'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.'"

"Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!"

"That deep torture may be called a hell, When more is felt than one hath power to tell."

"To me, Shakespeare lives if we keep performing his plays. He dies, when we stop performing them."

"Over the past two centuries, there has hardly been an author, certainly in the English-speaking world, who has commanded greater reverence than Shakespeare. … There is only one text in the English language that carries comparable prestige to the works of Shakespeare: the Bible, in particular in its most renowned version, the King James Bible, otherwise known as the Authorized Version, of 1611. … In view of the persistent juxtaposition of these two Anglophone cultural icons … it is hardly surprising that they also feature together in a number of fictions of Shakespeare's life, in the form of the fantasy of the Bard as co-translator of the Authorized Version. The originator of this motif seems to have been Rudyard Kipling. In his story "Proofs of Holy Writ," Kipling imagines Shakespeare in the process of revising parts of the Authorized Version with the help of Ben Jonson."

"Burgess's Shakespeare is not a patient empire builder or visionary, but rather an unhappy man caught in an unenviable position, at the midlife crisis age of forty-six. … Burgess's point may well be that literary quality is not always recognized during one's lifetime … due to an ill-advised display of his wit in the presence of the king, Shakespeare is currently out of favor. … Particularly ingenious in Burgess's story is the way Shakepeare even hides his name in the text of the psalm. As he is forty-six years of age, he chooses Psalm 46; he counts to the forty-sixth word, replaces it by "shake"' then he starts at the end, counts forty-six words backwards (leaving out of the account the cadential "'"), and changes that word into "speare." The surprising thing is, that the evidence shoring up this highly unlikely scenario is in itself authentic: in Psalm 46 AV, the forty-sixth word really is "shake", the forty-sixth word from the end (not counting "selah") being spear. Although Burgess's Shakespeare revises the psalm for wholly selfish ends, out of defiance and sinful pride, he does not thereby lose our sympathy. Unlike Kiping's self-confident sahib, he is not a superman that can lead nations; rather, in his everyday struggle with political realities, an unhappy marriage, and uncomprehending neighbors, he is a modern antihero whom we cannot begrudge his one moment of triumph. … For Burgess, art is the result of suffering between the hammer of what is and the anvil of what should be. He projects that vision on Shakespeare, whose drive for self-realization, impeded by his surroundings, finds an outlet in this act of creativity."

"Shikspur, Shikspur! Who wrote it? No, I never read Shikspur. Then you have an immense pleasure to come."

"Scorn not the Sonnet. Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart."

"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted. The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge."

"Few of the university pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down. Aye, and Ben Jonson too. O that B. J. is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow, Shakespeare, hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit."

"Shakspeare (whom you and every playhouse bill Style the divine! the matchless! what you will), For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despite."

"The occasionally expressed popular belief that Shakespeare must have helped prepare the translation of the Bible completed for King James in 1610 is based solely on the circumstances that a few famous passages from the translation and from Shakespeare's tragedies are the only specimens of Jacobian English most people ever hear. Rudyard Kipling, however, composed a whimsical short story, Proofs of Holy Writ, in which one of the translators consults Shakespeare and Jonson, and in 1970, Anthony Burgess pointed out that in the King James Bible the 46th word of the 46th psalm, translated in Shakespeare's 46th year, is "shake", while the 46th word from the end (if one cheats by leaving out the last cadential word "", is "spear"."

"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 study his commentators."

"Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting Quill Commandeth Mirth or Passion, was but Will."

"The stream of Time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakspere."

"Now you who rhyme, and I who rhyme, Have not we sworn it, many a time, That we no more our verse would scrawl, For Shakespeare he had said it all!"

"If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of."

"Voltaire and Shakespeare! He was all The other feigned to be. The flippant Frenchman speaks: I weep; And Shakespeare weeps with me."

"Then to the well-trod stage anon If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native woodnotes wild."