One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis...

Sometimes…the hardest part about letting someone go is realizing that you were never meant to have them.

That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t’ unloose; smooth every passionThat in the...

You speak an infinite deal of nothing.

Your face, my thane, is as a book where menMay read strange matters. To beguile the time,Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,But be the...

Get you gone, you dwarf,You minimus of hindering knotgrass made,You bead, you acorn!

We will meet; and there we may rehearse mostobscenely and courageously.Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream. Spoken by Bottom, Act I Sc. 2

And it’s what you never will write,” said the Controller. “Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn’t possibly be like...

Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you’d better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the...

It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare’s collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of...

By the time you have a platform for saying what you want, you’ve already become part of the system. It’s how it works.

I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.

It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can’t help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect....

It is the east, and Juliet is a jerk!

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim...

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixed mark...

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,Is the immediate jewel of their souls:Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;But he that filches...

O, pur se nella scelta c’è armonia, L’amore è poi assediato dalla guerra,O dalla morte, o dalla malattia, Che lo rendono breve come un suono, Celere come un’ombra, fugace come i sogni;Rapido come il lampo...

But Kate, dost thou understand thus much English? Canst thou love me?”Catherine: “I cannot tell.”Henry: “Can any of your neighbours tell, Kate? I’ll ask them.

That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet

I had a feeling about Shakespeare’s soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.

you make me melt” and still have her mind want something else entirely?

Impressive, most impressive, worthy lad,Thine Obi-Wan hath taught thee well, and thouHast master’d all thy fears. Now, go! ReleaseThine anger, for thy hate alone can strikeMe down!

In fact, Shakespeare was right when he said ‘twice a babe once a man’. We are born into the world as helpless, weak infants, and some of us end our lives as vulnerable, frail adults,...

willow trees, willow trees they remind me of DesdemonaI’m so damned literary

This was going to be worse than the time I table danced in the diner in high school!

[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn’t allow one small insincerity to creep in.

To be or not to be?’ That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. ‘To become more or not to become more’ This is...

In the works of Shakespeare, the most wonderful genius the world has ever known, there is the enormous number of 15,000 different words, but almost 10,000 of them are obsolete or meaningless today.

True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.

For this new-married man approaching here,Whose salt imagination yet hath wrong’dYour well defended honour, you must pardonFor Mariana’s sake: but as he adjudged your brother,–Being criminal, in double violationOf sacred chastity and of promise-breachThereon dependent,...

Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.

To die, is to be banish’d from myself; And Silvia is myself: banish’d from her, Is self from self: a deadly banishment! What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? What joy is joy,...

Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkissed.

My love, I have tried with all my beingto grasp a form comparable to thine own,but nothing seems worthy;I know now why Shakespeare could notcompare his love to a summer’s day.It would be a crime...

Shakespeare asked what’s in a name. Well, each of my clones won’t be named the same as me, but they’ll be me and just as sweet.

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

Imagine the same scene in HAMLET if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudius. We are all told Claudius will die by drinking the...

Turns out there’s a reason smoking is not allowed on construction sites.

I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear....

In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is—Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.

How do you mourn something that never really belonged to you?

From too much liberty, my Lucio, libertyAs surfeit is the father of much fast,So every scope of the immoderate useTurns to restraint. Our natures do pursue, -Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, –...

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

Yet but three come one more.Two of both kinds make up four.Ere she comes curst and sad.Cupid is a knavish lad.Thus to make poor females mad.

The fiend gives the more friendly counsel.

Ambition should be made from sterner stuff.

There is this quote that I read a long time ago. A quote that I loved and made me feel strong. It had stuck with me over the years, like so many of the other...

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

A southwest blow on ye and blister you all o’er!”The red plague rid you!”Toads, beetles, bats, light on you!”As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed with raven’s feather from unwholesome fen drop on you.”Strange...