The Meaning of Shakespeare Quotes

“As mythology shows, how can a being of a higher order enter a lower world except in disguise?”

“Life was given for something greater than glory or than the gain that can be gotten out of it.”

“It is an infallible rule after reading a play of Shakespeare’s: read it once more and deeper.”

“For my part, I believe that we are nearer the beginning than the end of our understanding of Shakespeare’s genius.”

““I won’t count this year” is not a whit sounder than “I won’t count this drink.” Life counts every minute.”

“Wikipedia: The Meaning of Shakespeare”

“Which is better, the truth without worldly possessions and position, or worldly possessions and position without the truth?”

“Shakespeare saw that the prolongation of innocence—of “infancy” as the biologists say—is the key to mature strength.”

“Wisdom is to be found in residents neither of the country nor of the city but in those rather who “hither thither fare” between the two.”

“Psychology goes deeper than politics and a knowledge of man himself must precede any fruitful consideration of the institutions he has created.”

“Where faith in the fact can help create the fact, says William James, it would be an insane logic that would deny our right to put our trust in it.”

“Shakespeare, like Dante before him and Milton after him, knew where the stars are, knew that heaven and hell, and even earth, are located within the human soul.”

“The greatest poetry has always depicted the world as a little candle of nobility threatened by an immense barbarism, a flickering candle surrounded by infinite night.”

“The poet was beginning to perceive that history has no significance until it is seen as comedy—and tragedy. Imagination was beginning to assert its mastery of fact.”

““Here it is,” [the poet] seems to say, as perhaps God did when he made the world, “take it, and see what you can make of it.” And different men make very different things.”

“In what do love and friendship consist if not in a perpetual acceptance of the angels and rejection of the devils that we discover in everyone with whom we are brought into intimate contact?”

“The true pupil perpetuates the genius of his teacher not by adopting his ideas or imitating his conduct but by carrying on and living out his spirit under the peculiar conditions of his own life.”

“Love bestows on those who embrace it the experience and wisdom of the race, compared with the knowledge schools and foreign lands can offer at the worst a mere counterfeit and at the best a mere beginning.”

“Now [Hal] pretends to be his father and banishes Falstaff. A little later he will become like his father and will banish him. Now he plays king. Then he will be king. Beware of what you play—it will come true.”

“[Henry IV’s] life became a continuous embodiment of the strange law whereby we come to resemble what we fear. The basis of that law is plain. What we are afraid of we keep in mind. What we keep in mind, we grow like unto.”