King Lear Quotes

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear. ~ Oscar Wilde

If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue. ~ Fernando Pessoa

[Shakespeare realized that] Women are able to understand themselves better on a personal level and survive in the world if they dress in men's clothing, thus living underground, safe (...). The presence of women disguising themselves as men dictates that the play be a comedy; women remaining in their frocks, a tragedy. In four great tragedies -Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear- almost all the women die (...).
How much the women have to adhere to the rules and regulations of their enviroment makes a large difference. Once Rosalind [disguised as a man in As You Like It] has run away from the court, she has no institutional structures to deal with. Ophelia [in her frocks] is surrounded tightly by institutional structures of family, court, and politics; only by going mad can be get out of it all. ~ Tina Packer

…every King must have a fool or risk becoming the fool himself. ~ W.H. Mitchell

King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare - or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear. ~ Paul Scofield

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

In the United States ... politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals. ~ H.L. Mencken

I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your majesty according to my bond; no more no less. ~ William Shakespeare

We look back on history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling; revolutions and counter-revolutions succeeding one another; wealth accumulating and wealth dispersed; one nation dominant and then another. As Shakespeare's King Lear puts it, "the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon." In one lifetime I've seen my fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, and the great majority of them convinced – in the words of what is still a favorite song – that God has made them mighty and will make them mightier yet. I've heard a crazed Austrian announce the establishment of a German Reich that was to last for a thousand years; an Italian clown report that the calendar will begin again with his assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Ashoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius. I've seen America wealthier than all the rest of the world put together; and with the superiority of weaponry that would have enabled Americans, had they so wished, to outdo an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of conquest. All in one little lifetime – gone with the wind: England now part of an island off the coast of Europe, threatened with further dismemberment; Hitler and Mussolini seen as buffoons; Stalin a sinister name in the regime he helped to found and dominated totally for three decades; Americans haunted by fears of running out of the precious ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

If you are playing King Lear you are the centre of attention anyway. You don't need to draw attention to yourself. It's all laid out for you. ~ Ian McKellen

Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.' ~ Simon Callow

I don't think of 'Macbeth' as the villain. I don't think of 'King Lear' as the villain. I don't think of 'Hamlet' as the villain. I don't think of 'Travis Bickle' as the villain. ~ Damien Chazelle

Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow. ~ Nick Hornby

He got up. It was too early to go to bed; at least, he was not in the mood for it. He pined for a bit of amusement - something cheap and easy. A seat in the pictures, cigarettes, beer. Useless! No money to pay for any of them. He would read KING LEAR and forget this filthy century. Finally, however, it was THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES that he took from the mantelpiece. SHERLOCK HOLMES was his favorite of all books, because he knew it by heart. The oil in the lamp was giving out and it was getting beastly cold. Gordon dragged the quilt from his bed, wrapped it round his legs and sat down to read. His right elbow on the table, his hands under his coat to keep them warm, he read through "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." The little gas-mantle sighed above, the circular flame of the oil-lamp burned low, a thin bracket of fire, giving out no more heat than a candle. ~ George Orwell

I think you have to find the humanity in the character and then the deterioration is a part of the process - the journey of the character. It's like playing King Lear. You can start off as a nice old man who finishes up crazy. ~ David Wenham

In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear. And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, "This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman." Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being. ~ George Orwell

I did a lot of theatre when I started out. It was the Lyceum, the Citz, the Tron and the Traverse. I came to London and did the Royal Court, the National, 'King Lear' at the Manchester Royal Exchange. I did little bits of comedy, like 'Rab C Nesbitt,' but I wasn't predominantly about comedy. ~ Ashley Jensen

King Lear asked Gloucester: 'How do you see the world?' And Gloucester, who is blind, answered: 'I see it feelingly.' I see it feelingly. ~ Earthlings

Nathan "N.R." Gaddis did not say ::

2109 fellow Goodreaders [can't be wrong] gave [King Lear] 1 star. Many call it boring. Some even say it is predictable and has no moral lesson. That these people have the right to vote and to procreate is frightening to me. ~ Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant. What place this is, and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments. Nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia. ~ William Shakespeare

I have three daughters and I find as a result I played King Lear almost without rehearsal. ~ Peter Ustinov

When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer. 'If that is possible,' we say to ourselves, 'then everything is possible'; a new phase in the history of human awareness has been opened up, just as it opened up when people first read Dante, or first heard Bach's 48 preludes and fugues, or first learned from Hamlet and King Lear(/I> that the complexities and contradictions of human nature could be spelled out on the stage.

This being so, it is a great exasperation to come face to face with new art and not make anything of it. Stared down by something that we don't like, don't understand and can't believe in, we feel personally affronted, as if our identity as reasonably alert and responsive human beings had been called into question. We ought to be having a good time, and we aren't. More than that, an important part of life is being withheld from us; for if any one thing is certain in this world it is that art is there to help us live, and for no other reason. ~ John Russell

He hath always but slightly, known himself ... King Lear ~ William Shakespeare

Her grandfather's books [ ... ] opened before Ada, a world whose colours were so dazzling that reality paled in comparison and faded away. Boris Godunov, Satan, Athalia, King Lear: they all spoke words charged with meaning; every syllable was inexpressively precious ~ Irene Nemirovsky

In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen ... Lear goes berserk on a heath but comes out of it for a few brief hours every inch a king. Zaccheus climbs up a sycamore tree a crook and climbs down a saint. Paul sets out a hatchet man for the Pharisees and comes back a fool for Christ. ~ Frederick Buechner

But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart - by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute. ~ M.L. Rio

The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

'King Lear,' I've been seeing all my life. I mean, the great actors of my lifetime ... to join their company, as it were, by playing a part that's challenged them, is one of the great joys of being an actor who does the classics. ~ Ian McKellen

My favorite-ever version of 'King Lear' is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas. ~ Ben Mendelsohn

A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity that ever were written. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter! My lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a jakes with him. *all cheer for Shakespearean insults* ~ William Shakespeare

It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been. ~ Paul Scofield

The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human - the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey. ~ Richard Preston

I've never been that guy who says, 'Ooh, I have to play King Lear'. First off, that'd be a disaster anyway. I tend to read something and see who's involved, and then know I want to be part of it. But I don't think I'm through with comedy. I still love to make people laugh. ~ Ted Danson

In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation. ~ Andrew Solomon

I'm mainly an airport author, and if you're trying to take your mind off the journey, you're not going to read 'King Lear.' ~ Maeve Binchy

King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure. ~ Andrew Coyle Bradley

With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base? ~ William Shakespeare

The gods are fair, and they use our little vices to punish us ~ William Shakespeare

Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous: Allow not nature more than nature needs, man's life is cheap as beast's. ~ William Shakespeare

A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition. ~ William Shakespeare

Fare thee well, king: sith thus thou wilt appear,
Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here. ~ William Shakespeare

When I closed in "King Lear" I went into a period of depression for about three weeks, and every actor I've talked to who's ever played a major, major Shakespeare role has done this. ~ Frank Langella

I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity ~ Harold Bloom

When King Lear dies in Act V, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He's written "He dies." That's all, nothing more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential work of dramatic literature is "He dies." It takes Shakespeare, a genius, to come up with "He dies." And yet every time I read those two words, I find myself overwhelmed with dysphoria. And I know it's only natural to be sad, but not because of the words "He dies." but because of the life we saw prior to the words. ~ Suzanne Weyn

I profess myself an enemy to all other joys, which the most precious square of sense possesses, and find I am alone felicitate in your dear highness love. ~ William Shakespeare

When we are born, we cry that we are to come to this great stage of fools,' I quoted from Shakespeare's King Lear. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies. ~ Robert Wilson

LEAR: ... yet you see how this world goes.
GLOS.: I see it feelingly. ~ William Shakespeare

Pour on, I will endure. ~ William Shakespeare

only as idiocy! I hope that you will write to tell me along what curves your mind is moving. For my own part I feel that we are on the verge of amazing things. Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness. I will tell you a secret. I have never read King Lear, and have purposely refrained from doing so. If I were ever very ill I would only need to say to myself "You can't die yet, you haven't read Lear." That would bring me round, I know it would. You ~ Christopher Morley

I have no desire to play King Lear or Hamlet. I never had a grand ambition. I just followed my nose. ~ Liam Neeson

No matter how many times we read "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The only time I've played a real baddy was when I was Regan in 'King Lear.' ~ Ashley Jensen

So young, my lord, and true. ~ William Shakespeare

[Addams's] idea was that the conflict between Pullman and his workers was analogous to the conflict between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in Shakespeare's play: an old set of values, predicated on individualism and paternalism, had run up against a new set of values, predicated on mutuality and self-determination. ~ Louis Menand

As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear. ~ David Crystal

I would like to do 'King Lear.' But I would like to do it in Swedish. ~ Max Von Sydow

Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lear' in Liverpool, and 'Antony and Cleopatra' at Stratford. One was produced with hardly a backdrop and the other with gigantic scene changes. I was impressed by what connected the two: the words and their life beyond the stage. ~ Romesh Gunesekera

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty, beyond waht can be valued, rich or rare; no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; as much as child e'er loved, or father found; a love that makes breath poor, and speech unable; beyond all manner of so much I love you. ~ William Shakespeare

Fool: The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.
King Lear: Because they are not eight?
Fool: Yes, indeed: thou wouldst make a good fool. ~ William Shakespeare

Authority is essential to society, but what we called in King Lear "transcendental" authority, with an executive ruler on top, depends on the ruler's understanding of equity. If he hasn't enough of such understanding, authority becomes a repressive legalism. Legalism of this sort really descends from what is called in the Bible the knowledge of good and evil. This was forbidden knowledge, because, as we'll see, it's not a genuine knowledge at all: it can't even tell us anything about good and evil. This kind of knowledge came into the world along with the discovery of self-conscious sex, when Adam and Eve knew that they were naked, and the thing that repressive legalism ever since has been most anxious to repress is the sexual impulse. ~ Northrop Frye

I was in King Lear with Sir Tom Courtenay at The Royal Exchange in Manchester. In fact, that's where I met my husband. I was playing Regan and he was playing Cornwall and together we fell in love plucking out Gloucester's eyes. It was great fun. Everyone assumes that I was Cordelia because I've got blonde hair but I was Regan and they gave me a long auburn wig. It was great, good fun. ~ Ashley Jensen

Come not between the dragon and his wrath. - William Shakespeare King Lear ~ Matthew Reilly

The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God. ~ George Steiner

I guess if they ever do a remake of 'Sophie's Choice,' I could play the Meryl Streep part. I've got to work on my Polish accent. Maybe I'll be the definitive King Lear one day. You know, if they ever feel that King Lear should be more Jewy. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

And worse I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say 'This is the worst. ~ William Shakespeare

From the American retelling of Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story to the Japanese adaptation of King Lear in Ran, Shakespeare's cultural influence is virtually limitless. ~ Gordon Smith

I feel like I've been on EastEnders all my life and now I'm playing King Lear. ~ Ian Holloway

There isn't a King Lear for women, or a Henry V, or a Richard III. You reach a level where you can handle that stuff technically and mentally, and it's not there. ~ Helen Mirren

I look at it like this: that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written two or three plays about the Kennedy family, and actors would traditionally play JFK like they Hamlet or King Lear. They just would. I mean, people have played JFK, and they'll play him long after I have. ~ Rob Lowe

People talk about the difference between radio acting, TV acting and stage acting, but I think it's all the same. For instance, when I played Vultan in 'Flash Gordon,' I put as much energy into it as I would with 'King Lear' - it's all part of the same thing. ~ Brian Blessed

Directing Skyfall was one of the best experiences of my professional life, but I have theatre and other commitments, including productions of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and King Lear, that need my complete focus over the next year and beyond. ~ Sam Mendes

Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn't remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky. ~ Edward St. Aubyn

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding. ~ Peter Ackroyd

I was at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where I thought, in my naivete, I'd stay for the rest of my career. I'd thought I'd work up through the ranks and go from spear carrier - or in my case, the eunuch, which was several rungs below the spear carrier - to King Lear. ~ Christian McKay

But the longer he listened to the King Lear fantasia, the further he felt from any possibility of forming some definite opinion for himself. The musical expression of feeling was ceaselessly beginning, as if gathering itself up, but it fell apart at once into fragments of new beginnings of musical expressions and sometimes into extremely complex sounds, connected by nothing other than the mere whim of the composer. But these fragments of musical expressions, good ones on occasion, were unpleasant because they were totally unexpected and in no way prepared for. Gaiety, sadness, despair, tenderness and triumph appeared without justification, like a madman's feelings. And, just as with a madman, these feelings passed unexpectedly.
All through the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching people dance. He was in utter perplexity when the piece ended and felt great fatigue from such strained but in no way rewarded attention. ~ Leo Tolstoy

You ain't never going to get rich that way, Johnson. And there's money in that dick. Lots of money. ~ James Lear

In the land of tigers the lion cannot be king. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. - ~ Stephen King

Father, brother, lover - he'd never really declared himself any of them. Certainly not the lover part, thought if Celaena had been another sort of girl, and if Arobynn had raised her differently , perhaps it might have come to that. He loved her like family, yet he put her in the most dangerous positions. He nurtured and educated her, yet he'd obliterated her innocence the first time he'd made her end a life. He'd given her everything, but he'd also taken everything away. She could no sooner sort out her feelings toward the King of the Assassins that she could count the stars in the sky. ~ Sarah J. Maas

If this is a dream, the details are good. It's the absolute truth. They are a novelist's details... but in dreams, perhaps everyone is a novelist. How is one to know? ~ Stephen King

Fore more than a decade - from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s - conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime. Civil rights protests were frequently depicted as criminal rather than political in nature, and federal courts were accused of excessive 'lenience' toward lawlessness, thereby contributing to the spread of crime. ~ Michelle Alexander

Elect the king or queen - what a funny concept. Everyone knew that elections only worked for judges and Congress. Making the executive branch pander to the people, go out begging for votes - that could only end in disaster. That structure would attract the wrong sort of people: power-hungry people with twisted agendas. ~ Katharine McGee

A people may let a king fall, yet still remain a people, but if a king let his people slip from him, he is no longer a king. ~ Abigail Adams

This was a fact so simple that it defied logic. It bypassed logic. ~ Stephen King

When you are a soldier you do not always realize there is anything beyond the will of your commander, the will of your king. But when you're on the field of battle, when the swords clash and the colors fly above you in all their glory, there comes a time when you wonder: Why am I here? All the brilliance fades, the glory becomes meaningless; the blood spilled and comrades dead, all for nothing when you have no cause to fight for. ~ Hazel B. West

For God's sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little spread over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! ~ Stephen King

The Man Without a Country, was an orator no one could silence and no one could answer. ~ Thomas Starr King

In God's kingdom we are not just people He saves but fellow heirs of all that the King has. ~ Hugh Halter

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider. ~ King Solomon

Stop now before i kill you a word to the wise from your friend PENNYWISE ~ Stephen King

Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death. ~ Jacoby Shaddix

I love you with all that passes for my heart. I suspect that kind of all-out love becomes a burden to a woman in time, but it's the only kind I have to give. ~ Stephen King

Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery. ~ Ambrose Bierce

I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation
Prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king
And queen moult no feather. I have of late--but
Wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all
Custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
With my disposition that this goodly frame, the
Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
Excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
O'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
With golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
Me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
Express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
In apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
World! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
What is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
Me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
You seem to say so. ~ William Shakespeare

O God, I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams. ~ William Shakespeare

One event that is both history and myth is the rain of blood around the year 1000 in Aquitaine and elsewhere in France. Reports exist from the early eleventh century of a blood rain that "fell upon the clothes of many men, and so stained them with gore that they shuddered at the sight of their own garments and tore them off." Fulbert of Chartres wrote that account in a letter to King Robert of France, after the worried king received a report from Duke William V about a rain of blood that fell in Aquitaine. Scientists today believe that historical reports of blood rain may have been due to dust containing iron oxide, ~ Joseph Finley