I stumbled upon ThinkExist today, so of course I punched up Shakespeare like I always do. I got a bunch of other people’s quotes talking about Shakespeare, which is actually kind of cool:
“If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded…, it was Shakespeare’s mind.”
– Virginia Woolf
“Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place; if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“If you locked Shakespeare in a room with a typewriter for long enough, eventually he’d write all the songs by the Monkees.”
“After God, Shakespeare has created most.”
– Alexandre Dumas Pere
“The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life : Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!”
– Robert Browning
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Don’t forget the famous passage from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen:
“That play must be a favourite with you,” said he; “you read as if you knew it well.”
“It will be a favourite, I believe, from this hour,” replied Crawford; “but I do not think I have had a volume of Shakespeare in my hand before since I was fifteen. I once saw Henry the Eighth acted, or I have heard of it from somebody who did, I am not certain which. But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.”
“No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree,” said Edmund, “from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions; but this is totally distinct from giving his sense as you gave it. To know him in bits and scraps is common enough; to know him pretty thoroughly is, perhaps, not uncommon; but to read him well aloud is no everyday talent.”
“Sir, you do me honour,” was Crawford’s answer, with a bow of mock gravity.