Poets From The United Kingdom

"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments."

"Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust."

"Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange."

"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."

"We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. The saying goes you live by the sword you shall die by the sword...It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."

"Nothing is more common than the wish to be remarkable."

"Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong."

"However wickedness outstrips men, it has no wings to fly from God."

"He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself."

"The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away."

"There is plenty of time to sleep in the grave."

"When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry."

"The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free.""

"when you look for the motivations you always go to the basic instincts, to the basic emotions, the basic things that have moved humankind always. That's what all writers write about, ultimately. What did Shakespeare write about? Jealousy, love, sex, power, greed, the same stuff that soap operas and the Bible are made of. It's always the same."

"Can you imagine if somebody told him in the 16th century, 'Listen, you're going to inspire a black girl in the 20th century in Arkansas, who will be a mute"?"

"I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is."

"Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct."

"Even if you do not realise it now, the time will come when you will be thankful that you were steeped in Shakespeare as boys. In him we not only have, as Sir Gerald Du Maurier said here not long ago, perhaps the greatest man the world has ever seen, but one who had a profound knowledge of human nature and of the world. Shakespeare was one of those few poets in whom we find the magic which comes straight from heaven, and which is the prerogative of the very greatest: such magic as we find in the poetry of Keats, in the first scene of the last act of The Merchant of Venice and throughout the sonnets."

"Shakespeare's plays, no matter of what country he may be writing, are redolent of our own soil and of our own country people. The habit of thought and the outlook of Shakespeare’s country people and of those wise men, Shakespeare’s fools, may be found to-day in our rural counties."

"Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves. Subsequently, he may teach us how to accept change, in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change. Hamlet is death's ambassador to us, perhaps one of the few ambassadors ever sent out by death who does not lie to us about our inevitable relationship with that undiscovered country. The relationship is altogether solitary, despite all of tradition's obscene attempts to socialize it."

"I love that moment in Joyce when his friend, the painter, asks him the desert-island question about which of the two greatest Western writers to keep: "I should like to answer Dante, but I would have to take the Englishman, because he is richer!" He is, it's the truth. He is richer than Homer, which is astonishing. Everybody in The Divine Comedy, except Dante the Pilgrim, has achieved their final form. But Shakespeare is change. In that sense, he always remains an Ovidian poet, and in the same sense, anti-Platonic."

"History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: "I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself." The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.""

"Shakespeare is a bard of mass destruction."

"Shakespeare's drama, where ideal women walk in worship, and the baser sort find sympathy."

"There, Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world. Oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time."

"If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilized discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up."

"Know the same favour which the former knew, A shrine for Shakspeare—worthy him and you? Yes—it shall be—the magic of that name Defies the scythe of time, the torch of flame."

"Shakespeare's name, you may depend upon it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into dramatic shape... That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny; but this was all."

"My object has been to dramatise, like the Greeks (a modest phrase), striking passages of history, as they did of history and mythology. You will find all this very unlike Shakspeare; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of writers."

"Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your Indian Empire or your Shakespeare, you English: never have had any Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakespeare? Really it were a grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare! Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our Shakespeare!"

"The first play I ever saw was a Shakespeare play... The great rolling emotion somehow comes through. So it was personal. But I think also if you're English and English literature is the thing, you can't help it. In Shakespeare the more I read the more I see the amount of things that come from Shakespeare or come via Shakespeare to the English cannot be exaggerated, and you find it everywhere, it's like the air you breathe. And so one's categories of character are so much the ones that Shakespeare created."

"The souls most fed with Shakespeare's flame Still sat unconquered in a ring, Remembering him like anything."

"The greatest genius that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded Shakespeare."

"He is of no age — nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind."

"He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher."

"The true description of us is the complex, ever-changing pattern of interactions of billions of them [neurons]... The abbreviated and approximate shorthand that we employ every day to describe human behavior is a smudged caricature of our true selves. "What a piece of work is a man!" said Shakespeare. Had he been living today he might have given us the poetry we so sorely need to celebrate all these remarkable discoveries."

"I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me."

"'I'm always ill after Shakespeare,' said Mrs Wititterly. 'I scarcely exist the next day; I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy, my lord, and Shakespeare is such a delicious creature.'"

"But Shakespear's Magick could not copy'd be, Within that Circle none durst walk but he."

"To begin then with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look'd inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of Mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches; his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the poets."

"If I would compare him Jonson] with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit."

"Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing. I admire him, but I love Shakespeare."

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

"Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third."

"What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?"

"England's genius filled all measure Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure, Gave to the mind its emperor, And life was larger than before: Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit. The men who lived with him became Poets, for the air was fame."

"The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century."

"Ultimately, Anthony Burgess's emphasis on the multiplicity of meanings latent in the text of Shakespeare's life foregrounds his own appropriation of Shakespeare … Clearly this is not an inconsistency on Burgess's part but a deliberate pointer at the inevitability of appropriating any given text, particularly that most irresistible one of Shakespeare's life."