Quotes & Sayings About Human Nature By Shakespeare

My soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin. — Soren Kierkegaard

What a piece of work is man! — William Shakespeare

The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating. — Marilynne Robinson

There are prating coxcombs in the world who would rather talk than listen, although Shakespeare himself were the orator, and human nature the theme! — Charles Caleb Colton

That's the real mystery, isn't it? Not whether he was a common merchant or the queen's son, but how he could understand so much about human nature. And write about it in a way that still rings true, all these years later.' ". . . " 'That's Shakespeare's secret. . . — Elise Broach

Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature,
endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. — Thomas B. Macaulay

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare ... — Rick Yancey

[The humanities] invite - they compel - us to confront the truth about ourselves and help us to inhabit with greater understanding the disjointed condition of longing and defeat that defines the human condition. Achilles' reflections on honor and memory and the fleeting beauty of youth; Shakespeare's defense of love against the powers of "sluttish time" Kant's struggle to put our knowledge of certain things on an unchallengeable foundation so as to place the knowledge of others forever beyond reach; Caravaggio's painting of the sacrifice of Isaac, which depicts a confusion of loves that defeats all understanding; and so on endlessly through the armory of humanistic works: the subject is always the same. The subject is always man, whose nature it is to yearn to be more than he is. — Charles Murray

My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand. — William Shakespeare

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that. — Lajos Egri

Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: — William Shakespeare

Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them. — William Shakespeare

This posture of skepticism towards the classics displays a profound misjudg- ment. For the great works of Western culture are remarkable for the dis- tance that they maintained from the norms and orthodoxies that gave birth to them. Only a very shallow reading of Chaucer or Shakespeare would see those writers as endorsing the societies in which they lived, or would over- look the far more important fact that their works hold mankind to the light of moral judgment, and examine, with all the love and all the pity that it calls for, the frailty of human nature. It is precisely the aspiration towards universal truth, towards a God's-eye perspective on the human condition, that is the hallmark of Western culture. — Theodore Dalrymple

Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other. — Edward Hall

Nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will. — William Shakespeare

Shakespeare has great ability to skirt around a subject and portray human nature. — Kelli O'Hara