Shakespeare Phrases Quotes & Sayings

Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' -the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity. — Alec Guinness

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affection,
Figures pedantical
these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation. — William Shakespeare

Shakespeare had found language for the agony of living with one's own mistakes. There were words for finding yourself isolated with your failures. Phrases for discovering that you were wrong, all, all wrong, wrong, wrong. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere - not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs! — Sinclair Lewis

A man in all the world's new fashion planted, That hath a mint of phrases in his brain. — William Shakespeare

Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io.
Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.
Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend. — Dan Simmons

It is no surprise that the only woman in antiquity who could be the subject of a full-length biography is Cleopatra. Yet, unlike Alexander, whom she rivals as the theme of romance and legend, Cleopatra is known to us through overwhelmingly hostile sources. The reward of the 'good' woman in Rome was likely to be praise in stereotyped phrases; in Athens she won oblivion. — Sarah B. Pomeroy

May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course. — Arthur Schopenhauer

For I am proverbed with a grandsire phrase ... — William Shakespeare

I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases. — Adam Mansbach

My father is in a new version of Heaven. He hasn't time to consider it yet, whether he is happy because he is hastening along the road with his father as day breaks, or just because he was asked to come and that now this is actually happening, or because he has been asked for a speech from Shakespeare and the phrases are coming like a long golden thread out of his mouth even before he has time to think of them. The words are there, and flow, as he works hard to, and now matches the long pole-vault strides of his father. — Niall Williams

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine. — Ian McEwan

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre. — George Edward Woodberry