The Complete Works Quotes

“Who knows himself a braggart, let him fear this, for it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works

“Sir, I am a true laborer; I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness; glad of other men’s good, content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.” (As You Like It, Act 3, Sc. 2.)”
― William Shakespeare, Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“better a little chiding than a great deal of heart-break.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; So ere you find where light in darkness lies, Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.”
― William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works [37 Plays + 160 Sonnets + 5 Poetry Books + 150 Illustrations]

“The fine purple cloaks, the holiday garments, elsewhere signs of gayety of mind, are stained with blood and bordered with black. Throughout a stern discipline, the axe ready for every suspicion of treason; “great men, bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king’s relations, queens, a protector kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their blood; one after the other they marched past, stretched out their necks; the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland, the Earl of Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest ranks of honor, beauty, youth, genius; of the bright procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the tender mercies of the executioner.”
― William Shakespeare, Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare

“Humanity is as much lacking as decency. Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court frequents bull and bear baitings; Elizabeth beats her maids, spits upon a courtier’s fringed coat, boxes Essex’s ears; great ladies beat their children and their servants. “The sixteenth century,” he says, “is like a den of lions. Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking. Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fullness. If nothing has been softened, nothing has been mutilated. It is the entire man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites, without the preponderance of any dominant passion to cast him altogether in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid as he will under Puritanism.”
― William Shakespeare, Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth;”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“Would the fountain of your mind were clear again,
that I might water an ass at it!”
― Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works

“whatsoever I have merited, either in my mind or in my means, meed I am sure I have receiv’d none, unless experience be a jewel—that I have purchas’d at an infinite rate, and that hath taught me to say this: “Love like a shadow flies when substance love pursues,”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“As his own state and ours, ’tis to be chid—As we rate boys who, being mature in knowledge, Pawn their experience to their present pleasure, And so rebel to judgment.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works

“some good I mean to do, Despite of mine own nature.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare

“There ‘s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is ‘t to leave betimes? Hamlet. V.2”
― William Shakespeare, Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“he that drinks all night, and is hanged betimes in the morning, may sleep the sounder all the next day.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare

“Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“I must not seem proud; happy are they that hear their detractions, and can put them to mending.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“impatience does Become a dog that’s mad.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“A leaner action rend us. What’s amiss, May it be gently heard. When we debate Our trivial difference loud, we do commit Murther in healing wounds.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“Yet I will try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare

“Julius Caesar is an ambivalent study of civil conflict. As in Richard II, the play is structured around two protagonists rather than one. Cesar and Brutus are more alike one another than either would care to admit. This antithetical balance reflects a dual tradition: the medieval view of Dante and Chaucer condemning Brutus and Cassius as conspirators, and the Renaissance view of Sir Philip Sidney and Ben Johnson condemning Caesar as tyrant. Those opposing views still live on in various 20th-century productions which seek to enlist them play on the side of conservatism or liberalism.”
― David Bevington, The Complete Works of Shakespeare

“Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked between son and father. This”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“Will you have her? She is herself a dowry.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“For never anything can be amiss, When simpleness and duty tender it.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“Think when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth; For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times, Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass:”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare

“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, Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“Notwithstanding the prevalent notion that the French poets are the sympathetic heirs of classic culture, it appears to me that they are not so imbued with the true classic spirit, art, and mythology as some of our English poets, notably Keats and Shelley.”
― William Shakespeare, Complete Works of William Shakespeare

“There may be in the cup A spider steep'd, and one may drink, depart, And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge Is not infected: but if one present The abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare

“Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike As if we had them not.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare

“No, madam.”
― Shakespeare, William, Complete Works of William Shakespeare ~ 197 Plays, Poems & Sonnets ~ Active Table of Contents