"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."

"Shakespeare's drama, with its fanfares and ceremonial, abounds in kingly ritual; and his people speak, move, act royally. Villains or heroes, it is no matter; it all lies deeper than ethic. We have for long talked of the Crown as the link binding an empire of free communities: that is true, and it is a great conception, herald and pattern, it may be, of a yet greater."

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

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

"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."

"He was not of an age, but for all time!"

"Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well."

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

"Shakespeare has throughout sounded, as has no other great poet or dramatist on record, the note of royalty. His is a royal world. Shakespeare's royalistic thinking is, for the most part, patriotic, and his work from time to time spreads its wings in national prophecy. Royalty and England tend to involve each other, and these in turn involve strenuous themes of war and peace, order and disorder, conflicts of personal ambition and communal necessity, contrasts of tyranny and justice, the whole stamped by the chivalric symbol of Saint George and aspiring to Christian sanctions. This Shakespearian royalty, conceived in the reign of Elizabeth I, is not dead; it has lived since, within the story of Great Britain, and it is alive today, in the reign of Elizabeth II."

"Shakespeare, at the youth of Great Britain's imperial history, is necessarily fascinated by the accomplished imperialism of ancient Rome. He feels England now as inheriting the great destiny of Rome... You can feel Shakespeare's sense of Rome's supremacy beside the new strength of Britain; which strength, however, must pay due honour to that Roman greatness which is its prototype. The meaning is clearer if we return to the Soothsayer's vision: he saw the Roman eagle as dissolving into the sunbeams of Britain."

"I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand"."

"Shakespeare is steadily preparing a synthesis of religious mysticism with national purpose; and this synthesis is not actually accomplished in the King himself, but rather in the royal child, Elizabeth... [T]he massive play [Henry VIII] ends with the christening ceremony of the baby Elizabeth, over whom Cranmer speaks the final prophecy, Shakespeare's last word to the England he loved... Every tragic insight, every penetrating sting of satire, every deepest religious intuition, orthodox or otherwise, of the greater plays, every lyric love of England's natural sweetness, is subdued within this last, almost ritualistic, offering by Shakespeare of himself and his deepest poetic wisdom to Elizabeth and her successor James I... [S]urely here, if never elsewhere, we can feel that this prophecy is offered...to the essential sovereignty, the golden thread in England's story, that line of kings in Macbeth stretching out "to the crack of doom", handed down from his day to ours. Macbeth was recalled, and Cranmer's lines forecast, by the "emblems" used at Anne Bullen's coronation: holy oil, Edward the Confessor's crown, the rod and the "bird of peace"... The conclusion to Henry VIII is no mere record of an historic past, but rather the one comprehensive statement in our literature of that peace towards which the world labours and for which Great Britain fights."

"When great poets sing, Into the night new constellations spring, With music in the air that dulls the craft Of rhetoric. So when Shakespeare sang or laughed The world with long, sweet Alpine echoes thrilled Voiceless to scholars' tongues no muse had filled With melody divine."

"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"?"

"Law is king of all."

"My bark is wafted to the strand By breath Divine; And on the helm there rests a hand Other than mine."

"Truth does not consist in minute accuracy of detail; but in conveying a right impression."

"The Holy Spirit of God dwelling in us, knowing our wants better than we, Himself pleads in our prayers, raising us to higher and holier desires than we can express in words, which can only find utterance in sighings and aspirations."

"By day the appalling loose beauty of prowling floes: lions’ heads, dragons, crucifix-wrecks, and a thing like a blown rose."

"In the swirl of its pool the home-coming salmon has no intuition of anything changed."

"Poets know their own poems in a way and to a depth that is unique.. even if they mumble a bit ..their delivery will still have important things to tell us."

"He who has no mind to trade with the devil, should be so wise as to keep away from his shop."

"A man's life is an appendix to his heart."

"Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, by degrees gnawing and creeping into it, as that does; till at length it has eat out the very heart and substance of the metal."

"[I]f there be any truer measure of a man, than by what he does, it must be, by what he gives."

"Passion is the drunkenness of the mind."

"[T]hough reason is not to be relied upon, as a guide universally sufficient to direct us what to do; yet it is generally to be relied upon and obeyed, where it tells us what we are not to do."

"The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them by a single sentence, consisting of two or three words."

"[N]o man's religion ever survives his morals."

"[T]here never was any heart truly great and generous' that was not also tender and compassionate."

"[S]ociety is built upon trust, and trust upon the confidence that men have of one another's integrity."

"[M]ost of the appearing mirth in the world is not mirth, but art. The wounded spirit is not seen, but walks under a disguise."

"For he that is a good man, is three quarters of his way towards the being a good Christian, wheresoever he lives, or whatsoever he is called."

"[H]e that despairs limits an infinite power to a finite apprehension, and measures Providence by his own little contracted model."

"An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the Rudiments of Paradise."

"Action is the highest perfection and drawing forth the utmost power, vigor, and activity of man's nature."

"Anger [is], according to some, a transient hatred, or at least very like it."

"Innocence is like polished armour; it adorns, and it defends."

"It is idleness that creates impossibilities; and where men care not to do a thing, they shelter themselves under a persuasion that it cannot be done."

"The covetous person lives as if the world were made altogether for him, and not he for the world."

"[W]onder is from surprise; and surprise ceases upon experience."

"[A]s for covetousness, we may truly say of it, that it makes both the alpha and omega in the devil's alphabet, and that it is the first vice in corrupt nature which moves, and the last which dies."

"Truth itself shall lose its credit, if delivered by a person that has none."