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…
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
Be absolute with death. Either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep.
Merely, thou art death’s fool,
For him thou labor’st by thy flight to shun,
And yet run’st toward him still.
How would you be
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? Oh, think on that,
And mercy then will breathe within your lips
Like man new mad.
But come what may, I do adore thee so
That danger shall seem sport, and I will go!
O time, thou must untangle this, not I.
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.
But ’tis strange:
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths;
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence.
Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious things we have,
Not knowing them until we know their grave:
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends and after weep their dust:
Our own love waking cries to see what’s done,
While shame full late sleeps out the afternoon.
All is whole;
Not one word more of the consumed time.
Let’s take the instant by the forward top;
For we are old, and on our quick’st decrees
The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time
Steals ere we can effect them.
I am not a day of season,
For thou mayst see a sunshine and a hail
In me at once: but to the brightest beams
Distracted clouds give way; so stand thou forth;
The time is fair again.