Shakespeare Prose Quotes & Sayings

There's no point breaking a lot of crockery unnecessarily. — J. Carter Brown

It's not in the draftsmanship, it's in the man. Like I say, a tool is dead. A brush is a dead object. It's in the man. If you want to do it, you do it. — Jack Kirby

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted. — Anna Brackett

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose. — Jonathan Raban

Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness ... To fight
Your idea of misery ... Submission
The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
The vice you detest most ... Servility
Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower ... Daphne
Favourite colour ... Red
Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish ... Fish
Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted]. — Karl Marx

Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning — Michael Swanwick

For the body at best
Is a bundle of aches,
Longing for rest;
It cries when it wakes. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

(W)hy is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was twenty I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for pleasure; now it lights me as I walk to think I have two acts of King John tonight, and shall next read Richard the Second. It is poetry that I want now -- long poems. I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing; having no time to waste any more on prose. When I was twenty I liked Eighteenth Century prose; now it's poetry I want, so I repeat like a tipsy sailor in the front of a public house. — Virginia Woolf

Thinking of you is pretty, hopeful,
It is like listening to the most beautiful song
From the most beautiful voice on earth ...
But hope is not enough for me any more,
I don't want to listen to songs any more,
I want to sing. — Nazim Hikmet

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord?
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it.
[The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.] — William Shakespeare

As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. — Anonymous

My sister's looking off to the side so half her face is in shadow and her smile is neatly cut in half. It's like one of those Greek tragedy masks in a textbook that's half one idea and half the opposite. Light and dark. Hope and despair. Laughter and sadness. Trust and loneliness. — Haruki Murakami

It's a very weird thing. When you see your house naked, you feel very protective of it and of the people who lived here before. — Emily Procter

I said
"I love you so much it's killing me"
and you kept saying sorry
so I stopped explaining
for it never made sense to you
what always did to me
to let what you love
kill you
and never regret.
As Romeo is dying Juliet says
"I am willing to die to remain by your side"
and love was never a static place of rest
but the last second of euphoria
while throwing yourself out from a 20 store window
to be able to say
"I flew before I hit the ground",
and it was glorious.
Don't be sorry.
The fall was beautiful, dear.
The crash was beautiful. — Charlotte Eriksson

Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
's been dubbed by [Us] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe [Us]
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers. — Tony Harrison

I decided to be confident one day, and then I just was. I think it's a conscious decision. Everything in society tells you to hate yourself, but you know what? If you decide to love yourself, it's an act of revolution. — Gaby Dunn

I think the sun where he were born drew all such humours from him. - 3.4.26 — William Shakespeare

You are strong ... Together we will rule the world."
"You mean, 'Together we will defeat Apophis,'" my mother corrected.
"Of course," Isis said. "That's what I meant. — Rick Riordan

I was only 11 when we filmed the pilot. The idea of a rapper being a star on a sitcom just wasn't heard of. — Tatyana Ali

We have already shown by references to the contemporary drama that the plea of custom is not sufficient to explain Shakespeare's attitude to the lower classes, but if we widen our survey to the entire field of English letters in his day, we shall see that he was running counter to all the best traditions of our literature. From the time of Piers Plowman down, the peasant had stood high with the great writers of poetry and prose alike. Chaucer's famous circle of story-tellers at the Tabard Inn in Southwark was eminently democratic. — William Shakespeare

I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose. — Neil Patrick Harris

Our God is righteous enough to judge and kind enough to forgive. — Kevin DeYoung

In the four decades after World War II, manufacturing jobs paid more than other jobs for given skills. But that is much less true today. Increased international competition has forced American manufacturers to reduce costs. As a result, the pay premium for low-skilled workers in manufacturing is smaller than it once was. — Christina Romer

We're as common as rain. And she was right: to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family, even exaggerations make perfect sense; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more. — John Irving

THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age. Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to the world Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson's grandfather was of Annandale, over the Solway, whence he — Ben Jonson

She gave me for my pains a world of sighs. — William Shakespeare

In the next election, can we vote to ban those ribbon things that kind of keep clothing on hangers but really just hang out of your armpits? — Olivia Wilde