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Hamlet Quotes

By Esther Lombardi, About.com

  • "Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  • "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  • "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  • "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
    That he should weep for her?"
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  • "He would drown the stage with tears,
    And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
    Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,
    Confound the ignorant, and amaze, indeed,
    The very faculties of eyes and ears."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  • "Bloody, bawdy villain!
    Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindles villain!"
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  • "I have heard,
    That guilty creatures sitting at a play
    Have by the very cunning of the scene
    Been struck so to the soul that presently
    They have proclaimed their malefactions;
    For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
    With most miraculous organ."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  • "The devil hath power
    To assume a pleasing shape."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  • "Abuses me to damn me."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  • "The play's the thing
    Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

  • "With devotion's visage
    And pious action we do sugar o'er
    The devil himself."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "To be, or not to be: that is the question:
    Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
    The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
    And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
    No more; and by a sleep to say we end
    The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
    That flesh is heir to,-'tis a consummation
    Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
    To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub:
    For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
    When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
    Must give us pause: there's the respect
    That makes calamity of so long life;
    For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
    The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
    The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
    The insolence of office and the spurns
    That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
    When he himself might his quietus make
    With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
    To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
    But that the dread of something after death,
    The undiscovered country from whose bourn
    No traveller returns, puzzles the will
    And makes us rather bear those ills we have
    Than fly to others that we know not of?
    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
    And thus the native hue of resolution
    Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
    And enterprises of great pith and moment
    With this regard their currents turn awry,
    And lose the name of action."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "Nymph, in thy orisons
    Be all my sins remembered."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "I am myself indifferent honest."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?"
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "I say we will have no more marriages."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
    The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword;
    The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
    The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
    The observed of all observers!"
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
    Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1

  • "O, woe is me,
    To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!"
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3. 1

  • "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I have pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the towncrier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "A robustious periwig-pated fellow."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3. 2
  • "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "To hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
    And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
    Where thrift may follow fawning."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "Give me that man
    That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
    In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
    As I do thee."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "And my imaginations are as foul
    As Vulcan's stithy."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "The chameleon's dish: I eat the air, promise-crammed; you cannot feed capons so."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "Here's metal more attractive."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I'll have a suit of sables."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

  • "There's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year."
    - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2

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