Essential Shakespeare Quotes & Sayings

By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag. — Michel Faber

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing. — William Collins

I often think ... that the bookstores that will save civilization are not online, nor on campuses, nor named Borders, Barnes & Noble, Dalton, or Crown. They are the used bookstores, in which, for a couple of hundred dollars, one can still find, with some diligence, the essential books of our culture, from the Bible and Shakespeare to Plato, Augustine, and Pascal. — James V. Schall

Then I stay beside you for as long as we have." He kept stroking my hair. Cats like to be petted. Cait Sidhe like to pet. "October, I meant it when I told you I was not leaving you. I will never leave you while both of us are living. You were not quite this human when I met you, and you were far less human when I finally allowed myself to love you. But the essential core of your being has remained the same no matter what the balance of your blood."
"How is it that you always know the exact right stupid romance novel thing to say?" I asked, leaning up to kiss him.
He smiled against my lips. When I pulled back, he said. "I was a student of Shakespeare before the romance novel was even dreamt. Be glad I do not leave you horrible poetry on your pillow, wrapped securely around the bodies of dead rats. — Seanan McGuire

The wholesale corruption of social relationships, even the most intimate, is an essential part of Shakespeare's chilling exposure of authoritarian politics. — William Shakespeare

Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. 8
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. 9
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. — T. S. Eliot

The church itself has got to go outside of its own borders and carry the Gospel to every creature, or it is no church of Christ; and any mutual improvement club which thinks that by reading its Shakespeare, or by acting its pretty tableaux, or by having this or that little reading from Spenser and from Chaucer, it is going to lift itself up into any higher order of culture or life, is wholly mistaken, unless as an essential part of its duty, it goes out into the world, finds those that are falling down, and lifts them up to the majesty of freemen, who are sons of God. — Edward Everett Hale