Shakespeare The Tempest Quotes & Sayings

Nothing any man can do will improve that genius; but the genius needs his mind, and he can broaden that mind, fertilize it with knowledge of all kinds, improve its powers of expression; supply the genius, in short, with an orchestra instead of a tin whistle. All our little great men, our one-poem poets, our one-picture painters, have merely failed to perfect themselves as instruments. The Genius who wrote The Ancient Mariner is no less sublime than he who wrote The Tempest; but Coleridge had some incapacity to catch and express the thoughts of his genius - was ever such wooden stuff as his conscious work? - while Shakespeare had the knack of acquiring the knowledge necessary to the expression of every conceivable harmony, and his technique was sufficiently fluent to transcribe with ease. — Aleister Crowley

For in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. — William Shakespeare

Good wombs have borne bad sons."
-- (Miranda, I:2) — William Shakespeare

A southwest blow on ye and blister you all o'er!'
'The red plague rid you!'
'Toads, beetles, bats, light on you!'
'As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed with raven's feather from unwholesome fen drop on you.'
'Strange stuff'
'Thou jesting monkey thou'
'Apes with foreheads villainous low'
'Pied ninny'
'Blind mole ... '
-The Caliban Curses — Gary D. Schmidt

Come, thou tortoise! — William Shakespeare

Lest too light winning make the prize light. — William Shakespeare

Caliban: As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island. — William Shakespeare

Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness! — William Shakespeare

Then to the elements be free... — William Shakespeare

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work. — Edward Hirsch

I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book. - William Shakespeare, The Tempest — Lev Grossman

What showers arise, blown with the windy tempest of my heart — William Shakespeare

As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed
With raven's feather from unwholesom fen
Drop on you both! A southwest blow on ye
And blister you all o'er! — William Shakespeare

Like a red morn that ever yet betokened,
Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field,
Sorrow to the shepherds, woe unto the birds,
Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds. — William Shakespeare

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment's apotheosis. — Jeanette Winterson

The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes;
And, by his hollow whistling in the leaves,
Foretells a tempest and a blustering day. — William Shakespeare

You mean we're going chronological order within each author?" he gasped. "But no one even knows for sure when Shakespeare wrote his plays!"
"Well," I blustered, "we know he wrote Romeo and Juliet before The Tempest. I'd like to see that reflected on our shelves."
George says that was one of the few times he has seriously contemplated divorce. — Anne Fadiman

Shakespeare's last play was called The Tempest. It wasn't called just plain Tempest. The name of my record is just plain Tempest. It's two different titles, — Bob Dylan

If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have waken'd death! — William Shakespeare

Lys. How now, my love? Why is your cheek so pale? How chance the roses there do fade so fast?
Her. Belike for want of rain, which I could well beteem them from the tempest of my eyes. — William Shakespeare

You tell me the dead are coming through a crack in my barn, but I shouldn't worry? — Kathy Bryson

To think but nobly of my grandmother: Good wombs have borne bad sons. — William Shakespeare

You mar our labour: keep your cabins:you do assist the storm[ ... ] What cares these roarers for the name of king? — William Shakespeare

At the happy ending of the Tempest, Prospero brings the kind back togeter with his son, and finds Miranda's true love and punishes the bad duke and frees Ariel and becomes a duke himself again. Everyone - except Caliban - is happy, and everyone is forgiven, and everyone is fine, and they all sail away on calm seas. Happy endings. That's how it is in Shakespeare. But Shakespeare was wrong. Sometimes there isn't a Prospero to make everything fine again. And sometimes the quality of mercy is strained. — Gary D.

Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself
Upon thy wicked dam — William Shakespeare

What, all so soon asleep! I wish mine eyes
Would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts ... — William Shakespeare

It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one's sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he coauthored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher). — James Shapiro

For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. Urchins
Shall forth at vast of night that they may work
All exercise on thee. Thou shalt be pinched
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made 'em. — William Shakespeare

There's meaning in thy snores. — William Shakespeare

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart ... even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining ... His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding
sometimes maddeningly so
for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley — Jennifer Lee Carrell

The urge to impose a single classification on SF ignores the generic hybridity of many novels: incorporation of the Gothic in The Island of Dr Moreau, of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Forbidden Planet, and so on. The rise of film coincides with the emergence of science fiction. The relation between SF fiction and film has included an ongoing fascination with spectacle and extraordinary special effects like those pioneered in Georges Melies's A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904). — David Seed

You need not be afeerd. Wm. Shakespeare The Tempest — Gerald Hickman

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(Lied about the world, lied about me)
That you have ended by imposing on me
An image of myself.
Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That s the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
And I know myself as well. — Aime Cesaire