Top 1200 Shakespeare Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.

Actors are different. Some actors play themselves very successfully, but I come from the theater. Having done Shakespeare, we sometimes did three or four characters in the same play.

Shakespeare, of course, makes us ever aware of transience, not only in the sonnets, but also powerfully in his plays - spectacles for a brief period of time and then gone, as when Prospero describes the pageant fading, leaving "not a rack behind."

I was thrust, excitingly, via 'Elizabeth' and 'Shakespeare in Love,' into a position one can only dream of, but it was startling, too. I was offered a multitude of roles riding horses in flouncy shirts, and I just thought, 'Hang on, I've just done that. What next?'

But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.

I think there are one or two things similar in Elizabethan English and contemporary Hebrew. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.

This was Shakespeare's form ; Who walk'd in every path of human life, Felt every passion ; and to all mankind Doth now, will ever, that experience yield Which his own genius only could acquire.

We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.

The leading character isn't always the most important or interesting character; when people think that the protagonist is the character portrayed, it's people who haven't read Shakespeare.

I am used to wearing corsets. Even when I was first starting out it was either Shakespeare or Chekov. Everything that I was doing involved corsets. I guess I am just not destined to breathe that deeply.

I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.

He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts. (Shakespeare, Love's Labor's Lost, IV)

Shakespeare, who never could think up a plot by himself, found this one [Macbeth] in Holinshed's Chronicles, changing it just enough so that no one would recognize the source. He didn't count on the resourcefulness of modern scholars, who have to discover things like this to become associate professors.

Now, when I talk about Shakespeare, I can't talk too much about Gielgud or Olivier. Because nobody knows who I'm talking about.

What could be more fitting - or more exciting - than to restage Shakespeare's plays on the very spot where they were first performed, in the shape and style of theater for which they were written?

Shakespeare is a seminal story-teller. I don't think he imagined he was writing classics or that he was writing great poetry. I don't think he dreamt his work would be staged 400 years after he died.

I think every New York actor's dream is to do Shakespeare in the Park. Each show is so special and unique and diverse because of the elements that we're performing in. Every live show is truly a one-of-a-kind.

We're not doing brain surgery. We're not saving lives... Even if you're doing Shakespeare, it's still entertainment. We're just entertaining people. We're just doing the stuff that comes on in between the ads.

Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild.

I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.

I just find the evangelical church too, well, restrictive. But the School of Practical Philosophy is non-confrontational. We believe there are many forms of scripture. What is true is true and will never change, whether it's in the Bible or in Shakespeare. It's about oneness.

It's not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people's costumes and pretending to be people that they're not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?

The sightless Milton, with his hair Around his placid temples curled; And Shakespeare at his side,-a freight, If clay could think and mind were weight, For him who bore the world!

I was the lead in 'Interview With The Vampire', until Tom Cruise decided he was interested. I was in 'The Wings Of The Dove' with Uma Thurman, until that got cancelled. I was in 'Shakespeare In Love' with Julia Roberts, until that fell apart.

William Shakespeare was a brilliant writer and he only wrote the truth. So, if I dont believe it, I have to work really hard to see what that truth is so that I do; thats the only way I can make it believable for the audience.

Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,--these are some of our astronomers.

I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.

In 1996, Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' was removed from classrooms after a school board passed a 'prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction' act. Apparently, a young female character disguised as a boy was a danger to the youth of Merrimack, New Hampshire.

It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.

Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature,--endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity.

The unseen energy that was once in Shakespeare or Picasso or Galileo or any human form, is also available to all of us. That is because the spirit energy does not die, it simply changes form.

I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.

Im lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer theres ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me.

Every time I do a movie like 'Finding Neverland' or 'Chocolat' or 'Shakespeare' in Love,' we deal with the creative process, but there's humor and fun along the way. I always love that kind of movie.

In modern life, we hide behind ourselves. In Shakespeare, there's nowhere left to hide. It's life, larger than life, and every actor has to raise their game to get there.

I went from an unemployed actor's life to doing stand-up comedy, and that was fortuitous. It's not the usual way the crow flies, going from being in a TV sketch show to playing one of Shakespeare's finest characters, but, hey, that's the way it has happened.

I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.

Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven't really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now - people were the same then, too - that's what's so wonderful and powerful.

In the great and deep qualities of mind, heart, and soul, there is no change. Homer and Solomon speak to the same nature in man that is reached by Shakespeare and Lincoln. but in the accidents, the surroundings, the change is vast. All things now are mobile--movable.

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

To do something for someone or something you loved-England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history-wasn't a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

Good or bad is a matter of perspective. I met an immortal hunami once, a man called William Shakespeare, who wrote that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

I'm an actor. I started as an actor. I started on Broadway doing 'Hair' and Shakespeare in the Park.

I had studied William Shakespeare in Oxford, England and I had this sort of high faluttin' education but I had also worked in comic books. So, I wasn't too proud to work in something like cartoons.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

There's something about doing Shakespeare with a single gender, whether it is all-male or all-female, that opens up certain possibilities. You are able to throw the behavior of the men into a particular relief and be playful within a slightly larger-than-life way with it.

I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.

When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice -- and many voices have to be suggested.

Vast objects of remote altitude must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but a single witness to his claims.

No age or condition is without its heroes . The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon , the least confused thinker its Socrates , the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare .

The surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definitive, and concrete. The greatest writers - Homer, Dante, Shakespeare - are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

You know, a vampire book is not a book to be the vehicle for big themes and stuff, where sometimes when you're dealing with art or the life of Christ or the oeuvre of Shakespeare, you know, it's a little more ambitious.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

[on whether he harbored any resentment at his forced retirement from the stage after he was fired by Britain's National Theater] I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods, feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare... An actor must act.

There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

Actors on stage, you can go from playing a myriad of roles, from Shakespeare to a Eugene O'Neil drama, and it's the norm. I came up in a world where you're supposed to be able to do three things very well. Act, sing, dance, paint, do something. The emphasis was on versatility.