William Shakespeare

(26 April 1564 - 23 April 1616 / Warwickshire)

poet William Shakespeare
#2 on top 500 poets

William Shakespeare Quotes

  • ''Danger knows full well
    That Caesar is more dangerous than he.
    We are two lions littered in one day,
    And I the elder and more terrible,
    And Caesar shall go forth.''
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Caesar, in Julius Caesar, act 2, sc. 2, l. 44-8. He feels he has to live up to his name.
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  • ''A friend should bear his friend's infirmities,
    But Brutus makes mine greater than they are.''
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Cassius, in Julius Caesar, act 4, sc. 3, l. 86-7.
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  • ''And where th'offence is, let the great axe fall.''
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Claudius, in Hamlet, act 4, sc. 5, l. 216 (1604).
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  • ''I'll mountebank their loves,
    Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved
    Of all the trades in Rome.''
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Coriolanus, in Coriolanus, act 3, sc. 2, l. 132-4. Promising his mother he will dissemble like a quack medicine-man ("mountebank") and beguile ("Cog") the citizens into voting for him.
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  • ''Don Pedro. But when shall we set the savage bull's horns on the sensible Benedick's head?
    Claudio. Yes, and text underneath, "Here dwells Benedick, the married man?"''
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Don Pedro and Claudio, in Much Ado About Nothing, act 5, sc. 1, l. 181-4. Benedick had boasted earlier that he would never submit to the yoke of marriage; the "horns" as usual suggest cuckoldry.
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  • ''You told a lie, an odious, damned lie;
    Upon my soul, a lie, a wicked lie.''
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Emilia, in Othello, act 5, sc. 2, l. 180-1. On learning of Iago's lies about Desdemona.
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  • ''But it was alway yet the trick of our English nation, if they
    have a good thing, to make it too common.''
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Falstaff, in Henry IV, Part 2, act 1, sc. 2, l. 214-6. "Alway yet" means ever till now.
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  • ''We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.''
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Gadshill, in Henry IV, Part 1, act 2, sc. 1, l. 86-7. "Receipt" means recipe; fern-seed was thought to make whoever carried it invisible.
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  • ''I am thy father's spirit,
    Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
    And for the day confined to fast in fires,
    Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
    Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
    To tell the secrets of my prison house,
    I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
    Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
    Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
    Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
    And each particular hair to stand on end
    Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
    But this eternal blazon must not be
    To ears of flesh and blood.''
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British poet. Hamlet (I, v). . . The Unabridged William Shakespeare, William George Clark and William Aldis Wright, eds. (1989) Running Press.
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  • ''The spirit that I have seen
    May be the devil, and the devil hath power
    T'assume a pleasing shape.''
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Hamlet, in Hamlet, act 2, sc. 2, l. 598-600. Reflecting on his father's ghost.
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Best Poem of William Shakespeare

All The World's A Stage

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,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in ...

Read the full of All The World's A Stage

Sonnet Cviii

What's in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?
What's new to speak, what new to register,
That may express my love or thy dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine,
I must, each day say o'er the very same,
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallow'd thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love's fresh case

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