William Shakespeare: Quotes about men

William Shakespeare was English playwright and poet. Explore interesting quotes on men.
William Shakespeare: 1398 quotes1104 likes

“I hold my peace, sir? no;
No, I will speak as liberal as the north;
Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,
All, all, cry shame against me, yet I'll speak.”

William Shakespeare Othello

Source: Othello

“Let me have men about me that are fat… Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Source: Julius Caesar

“Men are April when they woo, December when they wed…”

William Shakespeare As You Like It

Source: As You Like It

“Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all.”

William Shakespeare King Lear

Source: King Lear

“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!”

William Shakespeare

Source: Tragedy of Coriolanus

“O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!" - Cassio (Act II, Scene iii)”

William Shakespeare Othello

Source: Othello

“They say best men are molded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad”

William Shakespeare

“Keep time! How sour sweet music is when time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men's lives. I wasted time and now doth time waste me.”

William Shakespeare Richard II

Source: Richard II

“This rudeness is a sauce to his good wit,
Which gives men stomach to digest his words
With better appetite.”

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Source: Julius Caesar

“Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.”

William Shakespeare book The Rape of Lucrece

The Rape of Lucrece (1594).

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.”

William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

Portia, Act I, scene ii.
The Merchant of Venice (1596–7)

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Antony, Act III, scene ii.
Julius Caesar (1599)

“However wickedness outstrips men, it has no wings to fly from God.”

William Shakespeare

Derived from a longer quote in Henry V, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 283.
Misattributed

“All the world is a stage, And all the men and women merely players.They have their exits and entrances; Each man in his time plays many parts.”

William Shakespeare