Famous Shakespeare quotes and what they mean

He raises the comparison only to turn it down, because a summer is too short, too hot and too changeable to match the person he loves. The real boast comes in the last line, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”. The poem itself is what keeps that beauty alive.

Read all of Sonnet 18

Before the first scene begins, the Chorus gives the ending away. Two children of feuding families will fall in love, and the stars are against them, which is what star-crossed means. “Take their life” says both that they are born into this feud and that they will die by their own hands.

Wherefore means why, not where. Juliet is alone on her balcony, with no idea Romeo is listening below, and she is asking why the boy she loves has to be a Montague, the one family hers is at war with.

Juliet keeps arguing with his surname. A rose would smell the same whatever we called it, so why should “Montague” matter? The rest of the play answers her, and the answer is sad, because the names and the feud behind them are what kill them both.

At the end of the balcony scene Juliet keeps saying goodnight and cannot make it stick. Leaving hurts, and yet the hurt is sweet, because every goodnight buys one more moment together, so she would happily keep saying it until morning.

The friar says this to Romeo minutes before he marries him to Juliet. It is a warning, not a love line. Joy this fierce burns out the way gunpowder does the moment fire touches it, so, he says, “love moderately”.

The play’s first lines. Orsino asks for so much music that his appetite for love will be overfed and die, and a few lines later he is already bored with the tune. He is a man in love with being in love, and the line is a gentle joke at his expense, not a toast to music.

Iago warns Othello against jealousy at the very moment he is planting it in him. The warning is part of the trap, and the monster he describes goes on to destroy Othello and Desdemona both.

It gets quoted for any big decision, but Hamlet is weighing whether to go on living at all, and ending his troubles here means ending his life. What holds him back, he decides, is fear of what comes after death, “the undiscover’d country” from which “no traveller returns”.

Macbeth has just been told that his wife is dead, and the army that will end him is at the gates. Every day now crawls by like the last, and life looks like a bad actor’s hour on stage, all noise and no meaning. It is the verdict of a man who killed for a crown and found nothing in it.

Jaques, the play’s resident pessimist, walks through the seven ages of a man, from the baby “mewling and puking” to an old age “sans everything”. The play answers him at once. The next moment Orlando carries in old Adam, a servant whose loyalty the speech has no room for.

Prospero has just broken off a show his spirits were putting on, and he tells Ferdinand that the whole world, towers, temples, “the great globe itself”, will melt away like that show. A life is a short dream with sleep on either side of it. He says “made on”, not “made of”.

In the graveyard Hamlet is handed the skull of the court jester who carried him on his back when he was a boy. Death stops being an idea and becomes a face he knew, and he says “I knew him, Horatio”, not “I knew him well”.

Horatio says it the moment Hamlet dies, just after Hamlet’s own last words, “The rest is silence.” After a play full of spying and killing, the last word on Hamlet goes to his one true friend.

A soothsayer calls it out of the crowd, twice, and Caesar looks him in the face and waves him off: “He is a dreamer; let us leave him.” The Ides is the fifteenth of March, the day Caesar is killed.

Cassius is talking Brutus into the plot against Caesar. Fate did not make them smaller men than Caesar, he says. They allowed it. The line gets quoted as a call to take responsibility for your life, but in the scene it is a recruiting speech for a murder.

“You too, Brutus?” Caesar sees his friend among the men stabbing him, says “Then fall, Caesar!” and dies. The Latin is not in the Roman sources. The historian Suetonius wrote that Caesar died without a word, though some said he spoke in Greek, “You too, child?”

It is usually quoted as if the winter were still going on, but Richard is saying it is over. With his brother, the son of York, now king, the long war has turned into glorious summer. Richard hates the peace, and before the speech ends he is “determined to prove a villain”.

Richard has lost his horse in his last battle, and when a follower offers to help him get away, he refuses. He wants a horse to keep fighting and find Richmond, the man who kills him in the next scene.

King Henry sends his soldiers back at the gap in the town walls of Harfleur: take it, or fill it with their own bodies. In peace, he says, a man should be modest and still, but war asks him to “imitate the action of the tiger”.

Marcellus, an officer of the watch, says it after Hamlet follows his father’s ghost into the dark. A ghost on the walls means something is wrong at the top, and he is right. The old king was murdered by his brother, who now wears the crown.

The witches chant it together as the play begins, before we have even met Macbeth. It sets the rule for everything after, where good looks bad and bad looks good, and Macbeth’s first words echo it without his knowing: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”

The witches’ refrain as they drop things like “eye of newt” into the cauldron. The brew raises the visions that tell Macbeth he is safe, and that false comfort is what ruins him.

A witch feels someone coming in her thumbs, and the wicked thing at the door is Macbeth himself. Ray Bradbury later took the line as the title of his 1962 novel.

Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep, rubbing at blood on her hands that only she can see, while a doctor and a gentlewoman watch. After the murder she told her husband “A little water clears us of this deed”, and now no washing will do.

The spirit Ariel tells Prospero what Prince Ferdinand cried as he jumped from the ship in the storm. The storm and the flames were Ariel’s own work, done on Prospero’s orders, and not a hair on anyone’s head was harmed.

It is the last tip in a list Polonius gives his son before he sails for France, right after a word on clothes and “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. Polonius is a meddler who spends the play spying on people, so many readers hear worldly prudence in it, not the call to be your authentic self it has become.

Polonius announces he will be brief and then rambles on until the Queen cuts in: “More matter, with less art.” Wit meant good sense then, not jokes, so the line says wisdom is short, and the man saying it proves the point by being long.

Gertrude is watching a play in which a queen swears she will never marry again, and Gertrude herself remarried within a month of her husband’s death. To protest meant to vow, so she is saying the stage queen promises too much to be believed. Many editions print “doth protest”, the wording of another early printing.

The Prince of Morocco picks the gold casket to win Portia and finds a skull inside, with this scroll in its empty eye. Glisters means glitters, and the scroll itself admits the saying was already old: “Often have you heard that told.”

Portia, disguised as a young lawyer, asks Shylock to show mercy instead of cutting the pound of flesh he is owed. Mercy cannot be forced, which is what “strain’d” means. It falls freely like rain and blesses the one who gives it as much as the one who receives it.

Falstaff has just played dead to get out of a fight, and he gets up once the danger has passed. He is dressing up cowardice as good sense, and the proverb people quote, “discretion is the better part of valour”, keeps his excuse and drops the joke.

Falstaff has just told Pistol “I will not lend thee a penny”, and Pistol answers that he will get his money another way, by prying the world open with his sword. Today it means the world is full of chances, which is sunnier than a threat of robbery.

Casca is telling Cassius what happened when Caesar was offered the crown, and Cicero said something that Casca could not follow. In the play it is literal, since Cicero really was speaking Greek. Today it is the phrase for anything that makes no sense to you.

Helena says it once her trick has worked: she took another woman’s place in her runaway husband’s bed, and now she sets off to claim him. “The fine’s the crown” means the ending crowns everything, so the line asks you to judge the scheme by how it turns out, which is the question the play leaves you with.

Hamlet tells his old school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that Denmark is a prison, and when they disagree he grants that it may be no prison to them, since thinking is what makes a thing good or bad. It is quoted as a calm, almost Stoic idea, but he says it in misery, and a moment later he complains of “bad dreams”.

Hamlet has just spoken with his father’s ghost, and his friend Horatio, a university man, can hardly believe what is going on. Philosophy here means book learning in general, so Hamlet is saying the world holds more than any learning can explain.

Hamlet praises humankind in the grandest words he has, then drops them all. To him, now, man is only “this quintessence of dust”. He is telling his friends that he has lost all his joy, and the praise is there to show how far he has fallen.

The words come from a fake love letter, forged by Olivia’s maid Maria so that Malvolio, the household’s pompous steward, will think his lady wants to marry him. He believes every word, and at the end of the play he is mocked with this very line.

Helena says it about her old friend Hermia in the middle of a four-way quarrel in the woods, and it is meant as an insult: Hermia is short, and a vixen with it. On a mug or a tattoo it reads as praise, but in the scene Hermia is furious. “Little again! Nothing but low and little?”