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To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow.

— William Shakespeare King John (1598)

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Art

More quotes by William Shakespeare

Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.

I am a man,
More sinn'd against than sinning.

King Lear (1605)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

As You Like It (1599)

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Hamlet (1600)

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Henry IV, Part 2 (1597)

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A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

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Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Shakespeare (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.