Hamlet: Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring? Ophelia: 'Tis brief, my lord. Hamlet: As woman's love. — William Shakespeare
Oh my luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June;
Oh my luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune. — Robert Burns
O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. — Christopher Marlowe
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. — Alfred Lord Tennyson
O, my luve is like a red, red rose. — Robert Burns
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun. — John Keats
The setting sun, and the music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, Writ in rememberance more than long things past. — William Shakespeare
All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me. — William Shakespeare
The martini: the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet. — H. L. Mencken
And if God choose I shall but love thee better after death. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? — William Shakespeare
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets. — Oscar Wilde
Let me not to the marriage of true minds — William Shakespeare
When anarchy is declared, the first thing we do, let's kill all the anarchists. — Craig Reucassel
Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves. — Paul Krugman
When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime. — Giacomo Casanova
Sonnet Image Quotes
Shakespeare Sonnet Quotes
Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?. — David Ogilvy
In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that? — Roy H. Williams
The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out. — Gilbert Highet
There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he "has read" them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? — C. S. Lewis
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets. — Diane Wakoski
Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart. — William Wordsworth
Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets? asked Orphu of Io.
Are you shitting me? The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.
Yes, said Orphu. I am most definitely shitting you, my friend. — Dan Simmons
When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets. — Thom Gunn
Shakespeare, of course, makes us ever aware of transience, not only in the sonnets, but also powerfully in his plays - spectacles for a brief period of time and then gone, as when Prospero describes the pageant fading, leaving "not a rack behind." — Martha Ronk
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. — Rufus Wainwright
Love Sonnet Quotes
Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence. — Keith Devlin
If I asked you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. — Robin Williams
Being your slave what should I do but tend, Upon the hours, and times of your desire? I have no precious time at all to spend; Nor services to do till you require. — William Shakespeare
I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy. "Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away. — Jane Austen
In a world of bands called Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank, Electric Sheep rolls off the tongue like a Shakespearean love sonnet. Leave me alone. — Tom Morello
If I ever asked you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked a woman and been totally vulnerable. — Robin Williams
I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. — William Shakespeare
Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, "If science can't do something therefore religion can. — Richard Dawkins
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come. — William Shakespeare
Sonata Quotes
The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists. — Artur Schnabel
When I sit in Paris in a cafe, surrounded by people, I don't sit casually - I go over a certain sonata in my head and discover new things all the time. — Arthur Rubinstein
I want nothing better, more flexible or more complete than the sonata form, which contains everything necessary for my structural purposes. — Sergei Prokofiev
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. — Samuel Beckett
Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that's now not there. — Elliott Carter
I grew up with classical music when I was a ballet dancer. Now when I have to prepare an emotional scene, to cry or whatever, I listen to sonatas. Vivaldi and stuff. It's just beautiful to me. — Diane Kruger
Composing a concert is like composing a menu.... If you start with light pieces and play a 45-minute sonata after the interlude, it's like starting dinner with hors d'oeuvres and dessert and finishing with a Châteaubriand and vegetables. — Arthur Rubinstein
The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales. — Alan Watts
Art begins where technique ends. There can be no real art development before one's technique is firmly established. And a great deal of technical work has to be done before the great works of violin literature, the sonatas and concertos, may be approached. — Leopold Auer
The perfection of conversation is not to play a regular sonata, but, like the AEolian harp, to await the inspiration of the passing breeze. — Edmund Burke
I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone. — Tallulah Bankhead
I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life. — Pablo Neruda
Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new:
Endless labor all along,
Endless labor to be wrong:
Phrase that Time has flung away;
Uncouth words in disarray,
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode, and elegy, and sonnet. — Samuel Johnson
I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite. — Carol Ann Duffy
The next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the power of quiet. — Susan Cain
An intellectuals weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet. — Mario Benedetti
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting. — Sharon Olds
Dancing, is, for the most part, attended with many amorous smiles, wanton compliments, unchaste kisses, scurrilous songs and sonnets, effeminate music, lust provoking attire, ridiculous love pranks, all which savor only of sensuality, of raging fleshly lusts. Therefore, it is wholly to be abandoned of all good Christians. — William Prynne
If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered. — Anthony Burgess
I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head. — Sylvia Plath
Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit — Madeleine L'Engle
To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container. — Lorne Michaels
Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same. — A. R. Ammons
I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though. — Anna Journey
It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images. — Minor White
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks. — William Shakespeare
The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free. — Rachel Cusk
No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell. — William Shakespeare
Love that well which thou must leave ere long. — William Shakespeare
In Conclusion
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