In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can’t stand it.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Today, we’re still loaded down – and, to some extent, embarrassed – by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

If music be the food of love, play on.

I want you to feel happy and enjoy the theatre of my life the way that I do. No matter what happens with my music and wherever I go – that heart of that glamorous girl in New York will never be gone.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

Science is magic that works.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

Nothing can come of nothing.

I am not solicitous to examine particularly everything here, which indeed could not be done in fifty years, because my desire is to make all possible discoveries, and return to your Highnesses, if it please our Lord, in April.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.

I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.

If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail.

Not all those who wander are lost.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

In real life, I’m a really smiley person. I smile when I talk and I laugh.

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

I bear a charmed life.

I play a nobody in Japan.

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

The Indians on board said that thence to Cuba was a voyage in their canoes of a day and a half; these being small dug-outs without a sail. Such are their canoes. I departed thence for Cuba, for by the signs the Indians made of its greatness, and of its gold and pearls, I thought that it must be Cipango.

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they’re eating sandwiches.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

I give infinite thanks to God, who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn’t come here. Well, it can’t hide forever – one day we will overhear it.

I’ve got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I’ve done it.

A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore.