Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

Shakespeare has great ability to skirt around a subject and portray human nature.

When I read 'Paradise Lost,' or 'Richard III,' it is clear that Milton and Shakespeare took real pleasure and satisfaction from creating these epitomes of evil.

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.

Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.

If ever Shakespeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along, but when he is hurrying his imagination along.

One must never comment as an actor, never show that a character is shallow or vindictive, but let that be conveyed. I mean, none of us thinks of ourselves as being vindictive or shallow - perhaps we should.

To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.

I feel most people’s sexuality is enormously complicated. That’s what it means to be human. Wouldn’t it be great if we honored that complexity rather than turn it into gossip or ridicule? Wouldn’t it be great if we accepted sexual diversity, in ourselves and others, without condemning it?

Reduction! One wants to say more than nature and one makes the impossible mistake of wanting to say it with more means than she, instead of fewer.

Shakespeare, he's in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells, speaking to some French girl who says she knows me well.

Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.

it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

Anything an artist does is to show ourselves as we really are, which is a complex thing. I don't think that one work of Philosophy or Art, or Letters, or Acting, or Middle Playing, or Tightrope Walking, or Flea Circuses has made mankind better, if by better you mean kinder, wiser, more tolerant of each other. One thing self knowledge. Knoticayton: know thyself.

I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare's work - that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it's very real because it's so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.

Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.

I don't know what it means and I don't care because it's Shakespeare and it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words.