"This figure that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut, Wherein the graver had a strife With Nature, to out-do the life: O could he but have drawn his wit As well in brass, as he has hit His face; the print would then surpass All that was ever writ in brass: But since he cannot, reader, look Not on his picture, but his book."

"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 has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and Ludicrous characters and they sometimes produce sorrow and sometimes laughter. That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature."

"Such evil is often in Shakespeare felt as inhuman and bestial; it is—or should be—un-English; and the central symbolism to which Shakespeare's English warriors regularly appeal before battle is Saint George, the dragon-vanquisher. In Henry VI Talbot in a speech of national daring boasts he will celebrate Saint George's feast in France, and in the civil warfare of the second and third parts both sides cry on God and Saint George before battle."

"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 time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!"

"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!"

"Shakespeare, after a long line of outwardly non-historical plays, plays not obviously concerned with England's destiny at all, yet each...closely concerned with the deepest and darkest issues raised by consideration of that destiny in his earlier work, after all this, Shakespeare writes, as his last play, Henry VIII. His bark has come to harbour. He returns to a national theme, set nearer his own day than any previous attempt, and deeply loads it with orthodox Christian feeling. Here the extravagances and profundities of the great sequence come, at last, to rest."

"Children are made to learn bits of Shakespeare by heart, with the result that ever after they associate him with pedantic boredom. If they could meet him in the flesh, full of jollity and ale, they would be astonished, and if they had never heard of him before they might be led by his jollity to see what he had written. But if at school they had been inoculated against him, they will never be able to enjoy him. [...] Shakespeare did not write with a view to boring school-children; he wrote with a view to delighting his audiences. If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him."

"Shakespearean language is a bizarre super-tongue, alien and plastic, twisting, turning, and forever escaping. It is untranslatable, since it knocks Anglo-Saxon root words against Norman and Greco-Roman importations sweetly or harshly, kicking us up and down rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. No one in real life ever spoke like Shakespeare's characters. His language does not "make sense," especially in the greatest plays. Anywhere from a third to a half of every Shakespearean play, I conservatively estimate, will always remain under an interpretive cloud. Unfortunately, this fact is obscured by the encrustations of footnotes in modern texts, which imply to the poor cowed student that if only he knew what the savants do, all would be as clear as day. Every time I open Hamlet, I am stunned by its hostile virtuosity, its elusiveness and impenetrability. Shakespeare uses language to darken. He suspends the traditional compass points of rhetoric, still quite firm in Marlowe, normally regarded as Shakespeare's main influence. Shakespeare's words have "aura." This he got from Spenser, not Marlowe."

"This was Shakespeare's form; Who walked in every path of human life, Felt every passion; and to all mankind Doth now, will ever, that experience yield Which his own genius only could acquire."

"Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving."

"He seems to have been sent essentially to take universal and equal grasp of the human nature; and to have been removed, therefore, from all influences which could in the least warp or bias his thoughts. It was necessary that he should lean no way; that he should contemplate, with absolute equality of judgment, the life of the court, cloister, and tavern, and be able to sympathize so completely with all creatures as to deprive himself, together with his personal identity, even of his conscience, as he casts himself into their hearts. He must be able to enter into the soul of Falstaff or Shylock with no more sense of contempt or horror than Falstaff or Shylock themselves feel for or in themselves; otherwise his own conscience and indignation would make him unjust to them; he would turn aside from something, miss some good, or overlook some essential palliation. He must be utterly without anger, utterly without purpose; for if a man has any serious purpose in life, that which runs counter to it, or is foreign to it, will be looked at frowningly or carelessly by him. Shakespere was forbidden of Heaven to have any plans. To do any good or get any good, in the common sense of good, was not to be within his permitted range of work. Not, for him, the founding of institutions, the preaching of doctrines, or the repression of abuses. Neither he, nor the sun, did on any morning that they rose together, receive charge from their Maker concerning such things. They were both of them to shine on the evil and good; both to behold unoffendedly all that was upon the earth, to burn unappalled upon the spears of kings, and undisdaining, upon the reeds of the river."

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

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date"

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

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."

"Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?"

"All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand."

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

"I am a man, More sinn'd against than sinning."

"The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burnt on the water."

"Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."

"Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps."

"Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never."

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child!"

"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."

"The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life."

"A man can die but once."

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

"It is a wise father that knows his own child."

"All that glisters is not gold."

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."

"As merry as the day is long."

"The course of true love never did run smooth."

"Beware the ides of March."

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

"Nothing can come of nothing."

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind."

"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."

"Off with his head!"

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

"Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York."

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

"If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces."

"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."

"What light through yonder window breaks?"

"Down, down to hell; and say I sent thee thither."

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