William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was an English poet, playwright and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist and poet. He is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon.” His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. The best-selling fiction writer of all time, his most well-known works include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello.
Quotes by William Shakespeare…
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy:
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
I do believe you think what now you speak;
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory.
Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave,
and I will wear him
In my heart’s core,
ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.
I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality, that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
Dreams, indeed, are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
If circumstances lead me, I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the centre.
To expostulate what majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables — meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.
Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix’d with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.