Lear Quotes & Sayings

Blow, wind, crack your cheeks, I thought. Brian wasn't the only one who could quote Shakespeare. I made it to my room without thinking of any other suitably apocalyptic line from Lear, and I was too tired to start in on Othello. I flopped onto the bed facedown - and immediately I was bent into a bow shape, with the soles of my feet facing the back of my head. — Jeff Lindsay

Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in the silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have. — Frederick Buechner

In the United States ... politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals. — H.L. Mencken

Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow. — Nick Hornby

O, let me kiss that hand!
KING LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality. — William Shakespeare

Whatever else the religious Right may be, it is a bonanza for its opponents ... Reports of the great terror that is upon us are raising millions of dollars in fund appeals by Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, Norman Lear's People for the American Way, and others who claim to believe that the religious Right is the greatest peril to American democracy since Joe McCarthy. — Richard John Neuhaus

The only time I've played a real baddy was when I was Regan in 'King Lear.' — Ashley Jensen

I profess myself an enemy to all other joys, which the most precious square of sense possesses, and find I am alone felicitate in your dear highness love. — William Shakespeare

Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs. — Norman Lear

My favorite-ever version of 'King Lear' is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas. — Ben Mendelsohn

As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear. — David Crystal

There was a Young Person in pink, Who called out for something to drink; But they said, 'O my daughter, there's nothing but water!' Which vexed that Young Person in pink. — Edward Lear

The trafficking of sex and violence is comes after the demand for ratings. — Norman Lear

Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written. — Noel Coward

I guess because the shows were activist in their own way - the marriage of my public activism and my career activism, you know - people understand me very well. They also understand there's a very strong bipartisan part in all of this. — Norman Lear

We drove under a giant gray wing and headed out over open blacktop straight for a small white airplane standing alone. A corporate thing. A business jet. A Lear, or a Gulfstream, or whatever rich people buy these days. The paint winked in the sun. There was no writing on it, apart from a tail number. No name, no logo. Just white paint. Its engines were turning slowly, and its stairs were down. — Lee Child

I've played Lear three times, I would love to do it again. — David Ogden Stiers

In a sport that demands compulsion, sometimes the hardest task is having the confidence to rest. — Chris Lear

Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear."
"Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices?"
"I went for Lear," said Leon. "Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense. — China Mieville

He also flowered intellectually during his last two years in high school and found himself at the intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who were geekily immersed in electronics and those who were into literature and creative endeavors. "I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology - Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear. — Walter Isaacson

Any idiot would know women's needs are simple. All we want is your basic millionaire brain surgeon criminal lawyer great dancer who pilots his own Lear Jet and owns seafront property. On the other hand, things being what they are today, most of us will settle for a guy who holds down a steady job and isn't carrying an infectious disease. — Linda Sunshine

The best of life is the exercise of ingenuity-in design, in finance, in flying, in business. — Bill Lear

I've made a dog's breakfast of English history, geography, 'King Lear,' and the English language in general. — Christopher Moore

Her long periods of intense concentration began to be punctuated by bouts of directionless daydreaming, sudden explosions of feeling. At such times Shakespeare was too dangerous to be read closely - Hamlet whispered truths too cruel to be borne, every word in Lear hooked in flesh and could not be dislodged. As for Wilde, Hobbes, Schopenhauer . . . even cynicism, Marya saw, can't save you. — Joyce Carol Oates

Fool:
"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health,
a boy's love, or a whore's oath."
King Lear (III, vi, 19-21) — William Shakespeare

Fish fiddle de-dee! — Edward Lear

I will do such things,
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. — William Shakespeare

Lear Act IV, Scene 6
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back.
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp'st her. The usurer hangs the
cozener.
Through tottered rags small vices do appear;
Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. (Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.
Lear Act IV, Scene 6
Get thee glass eyes;
And, like a scurvy politician, seem
To see the things thou dost not.
Lear Act IV, Scene 6 — William Shakespeare

What you need is an idea. — Bill Lear

I walk into office, which is the casting office for CBS in New York. Mainly what they cast out of this office was the CBS daytime shows. I go in and walk into this room which every seat is filled with young African-American boys and girls and they were in their teens. I went, "I'm in the wrong place. Why am I here? What's going on?"So I go in and meet Norman [Lear]. — Richard Masur

LEAR: ... yet you see how this world goes.
GLOS.: I see it feelingly. — William Shakespeare

Life goes on pretty much the same way. I've been working on a couple of films on the side. You may see some more. You may even see another television show. — Norman Lear

But the strength that remains, which is principally destructive, is the film's dialectical relationship to most of the other movies that we see, its capacity to make their most time-honored conventions seem tedious, shopworn, and unnecessary. This originality often seems to be driven by hatred and anger, emotions that are undervalued in more cowardly periods such as the present... — Jonathan Rosenbaum

I've tried to tell a story. For me, it is the best one. — Amanda Lear

When I was growing up my favorite show was 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show', and I loved all the stuff that Norman Lear did. — Ryan Murphy

Love's not love When it is mingled with regards that stand Aloof from th' entire point. — William Shakespeare

Allow not nature more than nature needs. — William Shakespeare

I think that if Shakespeare had had access to CGI, he would have used it. Imagine Lear conjuring the storm and the lightning. — Julie White

Directing Skyfall was one of the best experiences of my professional life, but I have theatre and other commitments, including productions of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and King Lear, that need my complete focus over the next year and beyond. — Sam Mendes

When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain. — Norman Lear

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none. — Virginia Woolf

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul! — William Shakespeare

The evidence seems clear that those business which actively serve their many constitutencies in creative, morally thoughtful ways also, over the long run, serve their shareholders best. Companies do, infact, do well by doing good. — Norman Lear

There us a difference you know, between the male and the female ghost-"
"What is the difference?" Georgina asked.
"Oh, the male ghost is obsessed with venegemce, I find." Lear said, drinking again.
"And what are females obsessed by?" Hugh asked.
"Prick songs," Lear said. "Snogging. Same as when they are alive, really. — Julia Quinn

The actor is too prone to exaggerate his powers; he wants to play Hamlet when his appearance is more suitable to King Lear. — Sarah Bernhardt

In this nation, leadership is dollars. — Norman Lear

Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. "English," writes Virginia Woolf, "which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache." ... Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it. — Elaine Scarry

At great, great remove sit the head of General Electric, the head of News Corp, the head of Viacom, or the head of this giant international corporation that wants these ratings. — Norman Lear

I am a man more sinned against than sinning" (Lear, 9.60). — James Shapiro

So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care. — Norman Lear

There was an Old Person of Bray, Who sang through the whole of the day To his ducks and his pigs, whom he fed upon figs, That valuable Person of Bray. — Edward Lear

You ain't never going to get rich that way, Johnson. And there's money in that dick. Lots of money. — James Lear

As far as getting my start, it was really Norman Lear, even aside from being on 'All in the Family.' He helped me get my start as a director. He was the one who said, 'Let him do 'Spinal Tap.' Let him give it a try,' because I had been trying for years to get that thing off the ground. — Rob Reiner

Many older women are inhibited and afraid to act. It is such a waste of human potential. — Frances Lear

Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn't equate ... Life is made of small pleasures. Good eye contact over the breakfast table with your wife. A moment of touching a friend. Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don't have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don't mean anything. — Norman Lear

There was an Old Man of Columbia, Who was thirsty, and called out for some beer; But they brought it quite hot, in a small copper pot, Which disgusted that Man of Columbia. — Edward Lear

Fare thee well, king: sith thus thou wilt appear,
Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here. — William Shakespeare

I hate to spread rumours, but what else can one do with them? — Amanda Lear

I think you have to find the humanity in the character and then the deterioration is a part of the process - the journey of the character. It's like playing King Lear. You can start off as a nice old man who finishes up crazy. — David Wenham

How pleasant to know Mr Lear! / Who has written such volumes of stuff! / Some think him ill-tempered and queer / But a few think him pleasant enough. — Edward Lear

I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it. — Louis Auchincloss

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable. — Virginia Woolf

I've been lucky to get some path-breaking films, which proved to be the turning point in my career. Be it 'Rock on!' 'The Last Lear' or 'Raajneeti,' directors started working in a different way. — Arjun Rampal

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium ... Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author ... far from being the height of perfection, [King Lear] is a very bad, carelessly composed production, ... can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness ... All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language ... — Leo Tolstoy

Could five hundred men have painted the Sistine Chapel? — Bill Lear

Her grandfather's books [ ... ] opened before Ada, a world whose colours were so dazzling that reality paled in comparison and faded away. Boris Godunov, Satan, Athalia, King Lear: they all spoke words charged with meaning; every syllable was inexpressively precious — Irene Nemirovsky

When King Lear dies in act five, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He has written, 'He dies.' No more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential piece of dramatic literature is, 'He dies.' Now I am not asking you to be happy at my leaving but all I ask you to do is to turn the page and let the next story begin.
Mr. Magorium — Suzanne Weyn

There was an old man with a beard, who said: 'It is just as I feared! Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren have all built their nests in my beard. — Edward Lear

Na, she's righted again," said a cool young fisherman, "and they've gotten down that unchancy mast. They maun have stout hearts and skeely hands that work her; but it's for life, and that learns folk baith pith and lear. There! - but it's owre now. — Mrs. Oliphant

The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is. — W. H. Auden

I am even
The natural fool of fortune. — William Shakespeare

Granted, the writers, directors, producers, and that community make a great deal of money. But they might be choosing to do a whole lot of other things for the living they make. — Norman Lear

When something is over, it is over ... — Norman Lear

If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue. — Fernando Pessoa

I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity — Harold Bloom

If you are playing King Lear you are the centre of attention anyway. You don't need to draw attention to yourself. It's all laid out for you. — Ian McKellen

The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored. — Emily St. John Mandel

After we did [All In The Family], that ended up being a real love fest all around. Me and Norman, Norman [Lear] and me, Rob Reiner, everybody liked everybody. So about six or seven months later I moved out to L.A. and I got a call that Norman wanted to see me. I came in and he said "ABC has given me a property that they just optioned to make into a TV series. It's from a play called Hot L Baltimore, and I want you to be in it." — Richard Masur

We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history. — Norman Lear

What will happen to me, as the oyster said when he very inadvertently swallowed the gooseberry bush, nobody can tell. — Edward Lear

In his madness and his blindness he was Lear and Gloucester combined. — Susanna Clarke

We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago. — Oscar Wilde

The clown figure has had so many meanings in different times and cultures. The jolly, well-loved joker familiar to most people is actually but one aspect of this protean creature. Madmen, hunchbacks, amputees, and other abnormals were once considered natural clowns; they were elected to fulfill a comic role which could allow others to see them as ludicrous rather than as terrible reminders of the forces of disorder in the world. But sometimes a cheerless jester was required to draw attention to this same disorder, as in the case of King Lear's morbid and honest fool, who of course was eventually hanged, and so much for his clownish wisdom. Clowns have often had ambiguous and sometimes contradictory roles to play. ("The Last Feast Of The Harlequin") — Thomas Ligotti

But the longer he listened to the King Lear fantasia, the further he felt from any possibility of forming some definite opinion for himself. The musical expression of feeling was ceaselessly beginning, as if gathering itself up, but it fell apart at once into fragments of new beginnings of musical expressions and sometimes into extremely complex sounds, connected by nothing other than the mere whim of the composer. But these fragments of musical expressions, good ones on occasion, were unpleasant because they were totally unexpected and in no way prepared for. Gaiety, sadness, despair, tenderness and triumph appeared without justification, like a madman's feelings. And, just as with a madman, these feelings passed unexpectedly.
All through the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching people dance. He was in utter perplexity when the piece ended and felt great fatigue from such strained but in no way rewarded attention. — Leo Tolstoy

And worse I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say 'This is the worst. — William Shakespeare

O burn the house! You've murdered the husband, slaughtered the cattle, poisoned the well, raped the mother, killed the child - you must burn the house! You're soldiers - you must do your duty ... O burn the house! Burn the house! Burn the house! — Edward Bond

Kent. Who's there?
Fool. Marry, here's grace and a cod-piece; that's a wise man and a fool. — William Shakespeare

To be human is necessarily to be a vulnerable risk-taker; to be a courageous human is to be good at it — Jonathan Lear

I yet beseech your majesty,
If for I want that glib and oily art,
To speak and purpose not; since what I well intend,
I'll do't before I speak,
that you make known
It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness,
No unchaste action, or dishonour'd step,
That hath deprived me of your grace and favour;
But even for want of that for which I am richer,
A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue
As I am glad I have not, though not to have it
Hath lost me in your liking. — William Shakespeare

They danced by the light of the moon. — Edward Lear

In the area we're discussing, leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings. — Norman Lear

Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn't remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt. — Emily St. John Mandel

A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition. — William Shakespeare

[Shakespeare realized that] Women are able to understand themselves better on a personal level and survive in the world if they dress in men's clothing, thus living underground, safe (...). The presence of women disguising themselves as men dictates that the play be a comedy; women remaining in their frocks, a tragedy. In four great tragedies -Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear- almost all the women die (...).
How much the women have to adhere to the rules and regulations of their enviroment makes a large difference. Once Rosalind [disguised as a man in As You Like It] has run away from the court, she has no institutional structures to deal with. Ophelia [in her frocks] is surrounded tightly by institutional structures of family, court, and politics; only by going mad can be get out of it all. — Tina Packer

Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant. What place this is, and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments. Nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia. — William Shakespeare

Who, or why, or which, or what, Is the Akhond of Swat? — Edward Lear

And what can we expect if we haven't any dinner, But to lose our teeth and eyelashes and keep on growing thinner? — Edward Lear

A laughing Lear would be monstrous. Not so a laughing Romeo and Juliet. — Mason Cooley

I feel like I've been on EastEnders all my life and now I'm playing King Lear. — Ian Holloway

When I turned 18, was the first time that I really started concentrating on politics. And I started doing so because I realized that in order to really create and generate change, it has to come from changing laws ... so I started campaigning for Norman Lear's foundation, which was Declare Yourself. — Hayden Panettiere