"If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is our city of refuge.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.”
“The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.”
“Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.”
More on Literature
“But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]”
“What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?”
“Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.”
More on Shakespeare
“Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada.”
“But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws, But get thee to a nunnery - go!”
“But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.”