Well Known Shakespeare Quotes & Sayings

I am a close friend of Robert Loggia. And I just love how, with actors, there's the screen persona. Here is Robert, known for his portrayal of many characters, including gangsters. But in real life, he is elegant and erudite. He sits in the garden reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare. — Luanne Rice

Entirely incidentally, a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield. — Bill Bryson

I want to be known as 'The Big Shakespeare.' It was Shakespeare that said, 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them.' — Shaquille O'Neal

There is no doubt that Earth Central, the planetary and sector AIs, and even some ship and drone AIs are capable, without acquiring additional processing space, of setting up synergetic systems within themselves that result in an exponential climb in intelligence (mathematically defined as climbing beyond all known scales within minutes). So why not? Ask then why a human, capable of learning verbatim the complete works of Shakespeare, instead drinks a bottle of brandy, then giggles a lot and falls over. — Neal Asher

The result of the scientific work we have been considering was that the outlook of educated men was completely transformed. At the beginning of the century, Sir Thomas Browne took part in trials for witchcraft; at the end, such a thing would have been impossible. In Shakespeare's time, comets were still portents; after the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687, it was known that he and Halley had calculated the orbits of certain comets, and that they were as obedient as the planets to the law of gravitation. The reign of law had established its hold on men's imaginations, making such things as magic and sorcery incredible. In 1700 the mental outlook of educated men was completely modern; in 1600, except among a very few, it was still largely medieval. — Bertrand Russell

Such wanton, wild, and usual slips/ As are companions noted and most known/ To youth and liberty. — William Shakespeare

People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages. — George Weinberg

For me, Bach is like Shakespeare. He has known all and felt all. He is everything. — Pablo Casals

But hear thee, Gratiano:
Thou art too wild, too rude, and bold of voice -
Parts that become thee happily enough,
And in such eyes as ours appear no faults,
But where thou art not known, why, there they show
Something too liberal. — William Shakespeare

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

Let's say there was a burning building and you could rush in and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare's plays or some anonymous human being. What would you do? — Woody Allen

and thought to tart it up with a few Shakespeare quotations, having a vague recollection from my undergraduate days that the Bard was fond of joking about the great pox. I dusted off my battered copy of the Riverside Shakespeare and started leafing through it. Holy crap, I thought, there is a lot of stuff here on syphilis. My curiosity was piqued, and I did some more digging. Was there a connection between Shakespeare's syphilitic obsession, contemporary gossip about his sexual misadventures, and the only medical fact known about him with certainty - that his handwriting became tremulous in late middle age? I wrote an article that appeared in Clinical Infectious Diseases, supposing it to be of scant interest beyond its immediate specialty audience. To my surprise, it generated a fair amount of Internet buzz, and inspired a segment on The Daily Show. I began to think that there might be interest in a book on the topic of writers and disease, written from a medical perspective. — John J. Ross

To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, I wish I had known this some time ago. — Roger Zelazny

As for the play itself, it is perhaps the most popular and well-known of all Shakespeare's works and is also the longest and arguably the most difficult to understand. — William Shakespeare

Normally, I could hit hard enough, as anyone who studied my fights might have known. But the impression was that I was essentially defensive, the very reverse of a killer, the prize fighter who read books, even Shakespeare. — Gene Tunney

It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he'd had some training, but it is quite workaday and not well lighted. The main thing is that if it is Shakespeare, it is the only portrait known that might have been done from life, so this would be what William Shakespeare really looked like - if it is William Shakespeare. — Bill Bryson