Tao Te Ching
William Shakespeare
1564 – 1616 CE
The greatest writer in the English language whose works - 400 years after his death - have been translated into every living language and remain popular, respected, studied, and performed throughout the world; Shakespeare was as Ben Johnson wrote, "not of an age, but for all time.” When 18 years old, he had his first child 6 months after getting married and before long became a playwright and actor in his own and others’ plays. Unlike many of the prime movers on our biography lists, Shakespeare, though not revered, was successful during his lifetime (as a businessman) and by the time he was 33 while living in London owned the second largest home in Stratford. His influence not only revolutionized drama, scholars link more than 20,000 pieces of music to his writings, many famous paintings, his language helped shape modern English and common everyday phrases, Sigmund Freud drew heavily on him while developing his psychology theories, and Durant describes his influence as moving us to the depths of our spirit.
Lineages
Artists British Humanism Poets Renaissance
Eras
Chinese
Ming dynasty (1368 – 1644 CE)Sources
Unlisted Sources
Anthony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline
Henry IV
Henry VIII
Macbeth
Sonnet 104
Sonnet CXXXVIII
The Rape of Lucrece (1594)
Quotes by William Shakespeare (58 quotes)
“The gods are just and of our pleasant devices make instruments to plague us.”
from King Lear
Chapters:
80. A Golden Age
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“Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.”
from A Midsummer Night's Dream
Chapters:
40. Returning
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“Listen to many, speak to a few.”
from Hamlet
Chapters:
56. One with the Dust
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“Expectation is the root of all heartache. ("Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises.")”
from All's Well That Ends Well
Chapters:
48. Unlearning
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“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
from Hamlet
Chapters:
49. No Set Mind
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“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.”
from As You Like It
Chapters:
51. Mysterious Goodness
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“What a piece of work is a man! How noble… And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
from Hamlet
Chapters:
44. Fame and Fortune
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“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
from Merchant of Venice
Chapters:
67. Three Treasures
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“I wish my horse had the speed of your tongue.”
Chapters:
36. The Small, Dark Light
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“Like madness is the glory of this life.”
from Timon of Athens
Chapters:
8. Like Water
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“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.”
from Othello
Chapters:
2. The Wordless Teachings
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“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.”
from As You Like It
Chapters:
57. Wu Wei
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“All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.”
from Merchant of Venice
Chapters:
75. Greed
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“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
from As You Like It
Chapters:
67. Three Treasures
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“I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed! (In our last battle of wits he lost most of his, and now he’s only left with one, so I’m going to let him keep it so people can tell the difference between him and his horse.)”
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“Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.”
from Romeo and Juliet
Chapters:
15. Inscrutability
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“My soul is in the sky.”
from A Midsummer Night's Dream
Chapters:
39. Oneness
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“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
from Hamlet
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“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
from The Tempest
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“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that hath such people in it!”
from The Tempest
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“Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”
from The Tempest
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“You taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse.”
from The Tempest
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“And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.”
from A Midsummer Night's Dream
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“Choice... momentary as a sound, swift as a shadow, short as any dream; brief as the lightening in the collied night.”
from A Midsummer Night's Dream
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“The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself—
Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.”
from The Tempest
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“Earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice.”
from Merchant of Venice
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“Orpheus with his lute made trees, and the mountain tops that freeze bow themselves when he did sing; there had made a lasting spring… In sweet music is such art, killing care and grief of heart”
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“To business that we love, we rise betimes, and go to it with delight.”
from Anthony and Cleopatra
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“And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale.”
from As You Like It
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“Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
from Cymbeline
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“All things are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.”
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“To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still.
”
from Sonnet 104
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“By medicine, life may be prolonged, yet death / Will seize the doctor too.”
from Cymbeline
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“And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
from A Midsummer Night's Dream
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“The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.”
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“I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking: I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment.”
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“Men shut their doors against a setting sun.”
from Timon of Athens
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“Then a soldier, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.”
from As You Like It
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“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”
from All's Well That Ends Well
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“Good without evil is like light with out darkness which in turn is like righteousness without hope.”
from All's Well That Ends Well
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“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues”
from All's Well That Ends Well
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“Now I see the mystery of your loneliness.”
from All's Well That Ends Well
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“Strange is it that our bloods,
Of color, weight, and heat, pour'd all together,
Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off
In differences so mighty.”
from All's Well That Ends Well
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“Religious in mine error, I adore the sun, that looks upon his worshipper, but knows of him no more.”
from All's Well That Ends Well
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“Virginity, by being once lost, may be ten times found: by being ever kept, it is ever lost. ’Tis too cold a companion: away with it!”
from All's Well That Ends Well
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“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
from All's Well That Ends Well
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“How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?”
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“I have touched the highest point of all my greatness. And from that full meridian of my glory I haste now to my setting.”
from Henry VIII
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“Beauty itself doth of itself persude
The eyes of men without an orator.”
from The Rape of Lucrece (1594)
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“The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree.”
from Merchant of Venice
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“I am as poor as Job, my lord, but not so patient.”
from Henry IV
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“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt in your philosophy.”
from Hamlet
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“When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her though I know she lies, ...
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.”
from Sonnet CXXXVIII
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“Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”
from Macbeth
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Quotes about William Shakespeare (11 quotes)
“[Shakespeare] became William the Conqueror to all the dramatists of his time, and has ruled the English-speaking world ever since. His rich and riotous energy was the source of his genius and his faults; it brought him the depth and passion of his plays, and it brought him twins and an early death.”
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“Shakespeare is not only no genius but is not even 'an average author'... his words have nothing in common with art and poetry.”
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“The great poems, Shakespeare's included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy.”
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“For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.”
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“The whole civilized world has somehow been deluded into thinking Shakespeare a good writer, and even the plainest demonstration to the contrary makes no impression, because one is not dealing with a reasoned opinion, but with something more akin to religious faith.”
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“A silly song of Shakespeare’s has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.”
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“This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings; they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin.”
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“a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light... the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas who knew something or everything about this state of being... we wanted you to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao Tzu and Shankaracharya and Huineng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree... or how to parse a sentence”
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“Shakespeare is a barbarian who wrote monstrous farces called tragedies.”
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“Shakespeare was a man of keen humor and great sweetness of mind, who turned every sentence he wrote into melody. Elizabethan drama... found its extreme exponent in Shakespeare whose richest, subtlest passages are drawn from homely and even vulgar life.”
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“Shakespeare is a good raft whereon to float securely down the stream of time; fasten yourself to that and your immortality is safe.”
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