One Line Shakespeare 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

I don't remember the whole thing, because it was very long, but Atticus recited it for me once, and there was a line that went like this: "Cry ham hock and let slip the hogs of war!" I know you might not agree, but for me that was the best thing Shakespeare ever wrote."

You mean, "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" from Julius Caesar?

"No, I don't think that's it. There was ham in there; I'm sure he was talking about ham. They were going to battle hunger."

I think you might have been hungry when you heard it, Oberon. — Kevin Hearne

That sport best pleases that doth least know how, where zeal strives to content, and the contents dies in the zeal of that which it presents. Their form confounded makes most form in mirth when great things laboring perish in their birth. — William Shakespeare

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it. — Anthony Hopkins

I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line. — Maximilian Schell

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land? — W.E.B. Du Bois

There are many actors alone who haven't acted Pirandello or Shaw or Shakespeare for years because their plays are too aware of the world. We could use their anger. And we could use the honest rage of those historians who haven't written a line for forty years. True, we might form classes in thinking and reading. — Ray Bradbury

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare. — Helen Keller

Mike only laughed. "'Methinks the lady doth protest too much.'"
Gigi - "Methinks that is the only Shakespeare line thou doth know. — Sarah Strohmeyer

I think that Shakespeare had his male side and his female side extremely well developed. And this was a great quality of the Elizabethan, all-around Renaissance man. They were not afraid of their male side and their female side co-existing. This somewhere along the line got lost. And then it got misunderstood. — Ben Kingsley

Shakespeare has surface beneath surface to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many phases of truth, each with a scope large enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretations of his symbols, and a thousand years hence a world of new readers will possess a whole library of new books, as we ourselves do, in these volumes old already. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never plotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand. — Ben Jonson

So young, my lord, and true. — William Shakespeare

Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears
Moist it again, and frame some feeling line
That may discover such integrity. — William Shakespeare

Shakespeare is renewed each time you see it or read it. I've seen 'Midsummer Night's Dream' so many times, and each time it's a little different, or a different line leaps out at me. It's like re-reading a good book over and over, always noticing something you hadn't seen the time before - and that's rare. — Michelle Dockery

Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books,
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks. — William Shakespeare

The desire to lift, the willingness to help, and the graciousness to give come from a heart filled with love. The poet wrote, 'Love is the most noble attribute of the human soul.' And William Shakespeare cautioned, 'They do not love who do not show their love' (Two Gentlemen of Verona, act 1, sc. 2, line 31). — Thomas S. Monson

I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare. — Peter Carey

A new report claims that William Shakespeare was a marijuana user and may have been high when he wrote some of his plays. Which explains that one line: 'To be, or not to be ... Wait, what was the question?' — Jimmy Fallon

All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare — Jorge Luis Borges

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order. — William Shakespeare

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter , published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading of Ulysses did I discover, in the middle of the long and intricate mock-Shakespeare scene at the National Library, the line 'Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter.' So now I think Orwell quarried his title from there, too. — Christopher Hitchens

The first time I ever acted was in 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and my first line was, 'I didn't know Shakespeare had a sister.' — Bill Hader

What do you want from me, Ambrose?" Fern cried from behind her hands. He pulled at her wrists, wanting to see her face as he laid it all on the line.
"I want your body. I want your mouth. I want your red hair in my hands. I want your laugh and your funny faces. I want your friendship and your inspirational thoughts. I want Shakespeare and Amber Rose novels and your memories of Bailey. And I want you to come with me when I go. — Amy Harmon

It is characteristic of poetic language that it gives us not simply the denotation of a word, but a whole cluster of connotations or associated meanings ... [but] if connotation is a kind of free associating, how can a poem ever come to mean anything definite? What if Shakespeare's line 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' reminds me irresistibly of fried bananas? The brief answer to this is that meaning is not a matter of psychological associations. Indeed, there is a sense in which it is not a 'psychological' matter at all. Meaning is not an arbitrary process in our heads, but a rule-governed social practice; and unless that line 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' could plausibly, in principle, suggest fried bananas to other readers as well, it cannot be part of its meaning. — Terry Eagleton

The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art. — Montgomery Clift

As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line. — Leonard Cohen