Top 100 Hamlet Hamlet Quotes
#1. You can't automate in the arts. Since the sixteenth century there has been no change in the number of people necessary to produce Hamlet.
William T. Wiley
#2. I ask myself more questions than Hamlet as I ponder which shoes to wear
Eva Gabor
#4. To persevere
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness: 'tis unmanly grief.
William Shakespeare
#6. Scholars don't have blood flowing in their veins," said Hamlet. "When they're wounded, they bleed logic, and when all of it is gone, their brains die, and they become ... soldiers.
Orson Scott Card
#7. We remake 'Hamlet' all the time. That's sort of what we do, humans.
Joel Kinnaman
#8. Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.
Oscar Wilde
#9. What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#10. Some people consider the way Shakespeare was writing about Ophelia as erotomania-that she was delusional in thinking that Hamlet was in love with her. But I don't think so.
Jack White
#11. Polonius to Laertes (in Hamlet): To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man [or woman].
Christopher Ryan
#12. Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Harold Bloom
#13. I've played Hamlet and Coriolanus, Orlando in 'As You like It' and Ariel in 'Tempest,' among others.
Christian Camargo
#14. Where is Polonius?
HAMLET
In heaven. Send hither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself. But if indeed you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.
William Shakespeare
#15. Pretend to be mad and talk a lot. Then - and this is the important bit - do nothing at all until you absolutely have to and then make sure everyone dies.
Jasper Fforde
#17. Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.
Douglas Adams
#18. Hamlet, that's the only role there is, finally. The only role. After that, you settle down and only do the fun things on stage.
Stephen Lang
#19. I met Hamlet at a number 48B bus stop," said Mr. Gedeon. "He'd been there for some time, poor chap. At least eight buses had passed him by, and he hadn't taken any of them. It's to be expected, I suppose. It's in his nature.
John Connolly
#20. I do everything I can to have a diverse career because I just want to have options. I know that I can do Hamlet or I can do Stanley Kowalski, you know.
Sam Rockwell
#21. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honour's at the stake.
William Shakespeare
#22. It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.
P.G. Wodehouse
#23. The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt - even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called.
C.S. Lewis
#24. Mr. Upward italicises "at the present time" because he realises that you cannot, for instance, dismiss Hamlet on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist.
George Orwell
#25. O good Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story ...
O, I die, Horatio;
William Shakespeare
#26. I have felt some twinges recently, about parts I wanted to play that I may be getting too old and fat to do. 'Hamlet,' for example - maybe that's gone. I would love to play Richard II.
Matthew Macfadyen
#27. I've done classical theaters. I played Hamlet myself and Romeo.
Damian Lewis
#28. 'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.
Meghan O'Rourke
#29. O,speak to me no more;these words like daggers enter my ears.(a fancy way of saying SHUT UP!)"
- William Shakespeare "hamlet
William Shakespeare
#30. Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
H.L. Mencken
#32. The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment ... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Alfred North Whitehead
#33. Few areas which are not publicly owned can boast as many footpaths as the Cuckmere Valley. For a short walk, a footbridge across the river leads back to the little hamlet of Milton Street, where another classic local pub, the Sussex Ox, provides an admirable lunch.
David Hewson
#34. My favorite play is Hamlet. It was my first love when it comes to Shakespeare, and I've read it and seen it performed more than just about every other Shakespeare play. I've had the "To be or not to be" monologue memorized since I was 15, and it's just really close to my heart.
Ian Doescher
#35. Richard III is not likeable. Macbeth is not likeable. Hamlet is not likeable. And yet you can't take your eyes off them. I'm far more interested in that than I am in any sort of likeability.
Beau Willimon
#36. The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
Orson Welles
#38. Lord Hamlet, It seems you see all women as deceivers, be they beautiful or ugly. Perhaps the fault lies in the man who trust only his sight and is a slave to his base desire!
Lisa M. Klein
#39. You have to learn the language of Hamlet.
Edward Bond
#40. I will have the children read Hamlet as soon as it is practical. There are some useful cautions against eavesdropping to be gleaned from that.
Maryrose Wood
#41. It was horrible and senseless, and I now felt the sudden need to drink scotch, brood, and read Edgar Allen Poe or the ending to Hamlet. Maybe I would top it all off with some YouTube videos of drowning kittens while listening to Radiohead.
Penny Reid
#42. I am not one of those people who like to play. I don't. I'm neither coy, nor do I, in any way, want to ask anyone to put up with somebody playing Hamlet.
Lou Dobbs
#43. That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.
William Shakespeare
#45. In 1600, when Shakespeare's audience at the Globe heard 'Hamlet' for the first time, every one of them knew very well what it meant to be handed a cup of wine by a figure of authority and told to drink.
Neil MacGregor
#46. I ram my phone back in my pocket and reread the same page in Hamlet for the thirteenth time. I still don't see how this is supposed to be English. I have no clue what these people are saying.
Rachel Harris
#47. I was so scared of going back to the theatre after 'Hamlet.' I didn't know if I'd do a play again because I was afraid of the power of it.
Alan Cumming
#48. Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.
William Shakespeare
#50. The actor is too prone to exaggerate his powers; he wants to play Hamlet when his appearance is more suitable to King Lear.
Sarah Bernhardt
#51. A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.
Hector Berlioz
#52. I would love to play Henry IV, Henry V, and Hamlet.
Finn Wittrock
#53. A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.
Carol Zaleski
#54. Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?
Robert A. Heinlein
#55. To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters.
Ernst F. Schumacher
#57. I have never wanted to check out the family folklore that we could be traced back to a dominie at the hamlet of Balquhidder in the Scottish highlands.
James Black
#58. Probably 90 percent of the stuff I make has inevitably been done before ... Whether it's playing Hamlet, which has been on the go for 400 years, or pieces from the cinematic world that also have been essayed before, I feel released by that.
Kenneth Branagh
#59. We've been rehearsing a classic from antiquity, Green Eggs and Hamlet, the story of a young prince of Denmark who goes mad, drowns his girlfriend, and in his remorse, forces spoiled breakfast on all whom he meets.
Christopher Moore
#60. The trap in Hamlet is he's the most passive of Shakespeare's characters. He's not a Richard III, not out there taking a lot of action. It's a lot of asides and soliloquies where he's wrapped in angst, and that's not a very interesting character.
Kurt Sutter
#61. Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.
Hugh Kingsmill
#62. What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?
Brendan Fraser
#63. We want to do for 'Hamlet' what Baz Luhrmann did for 'Romeo and Juliet' in terms of like a really cool kind of re-imagining.
Emile Hirsch
#64. Five billion people have played Hamlet. 'To be or not to be.' And how do you do that and find your way into your own journey, your own way of telling it?
Annette Bening
#66. The stage can be defined as a place where Shakespeare murdered Hamlet and a great many Hamlets murdered Shakespeare.
Robert Morse
#67. You're wallowing in guilt and he's playing the martyr. It's like living in the middle of Hamlet.
Susan Mallery
#69. There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.
Peter Greenaway
#71. If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency; if the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will;
Daniel Webster
#73. Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'
Stephen Sondheim
#74. Quebec from the boat looked like the ramparts where Hamlet's ghost might have walked.
Charlie Chaplin
#75. If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.
Thomas C. Foster
#77. They hold their phones out like Hamlet addressing Yorick's skull...
Chase Novak
#78. Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
William Shakespeare
#79. What a silly, frail, and forward pieces are the best of men (647)!
Richard Baxter
#80. How can one deduce the cause of "Hamlet" or "Saint Matthew's Passion"? What is the cause of inspiration?
William F. Buckley Jr.
#81. When you are at the right age to play Hamlet you are still to young and immature to play it. It is much later, when you get the life experience and the emotional power, that you understand Hamlet or Macbeth.
Anthony Hopkins
#82. I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.
Ian McKellen
#83. I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble!
Seanan McGuire
#85. KING CLAUDIUS
How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
HAMLET
Not so, my lord; I am too much i' the sun.
William Shakespeare
#86. The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.'
Karin Slaughter
#87. Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off ... Do not for ever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
William Shakespeare
#88. I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.
Ian Doescher
#89. I had a good theater career for years. I played Hamlet when I was 22, and I've played some really great roles.
Jason Gann
#90. Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
John E. Douglas
#91. Would you go to see a brilliant actor who's been framed for something that he didn't do, and put him on a stage and say he's going to do Hamlet for you, and why don't you enjoy it? That's a hell of an analogy, but it's about the same thing.
Jerry Stiller
#92. One burst after another as my wife turned in her sleep. I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,
Billy Collins
#93. And yet, when we stopped at the last hamlet and I saw him embrace the elders and leave gifts, saw the hope that he left behind, and remembered it was he who had saved Kaden from the savagery of his own kind, I wondered if anything I felt in my gut really mattered.
Mary E. Pearson
#94. Shakespeare without Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet would be all too much like Hamlet without the prince.
Brand Blanshard
#95. On Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in a 1948 film: Olivier's idea of introspection was to hood his eyes, dentalize his consonants and let the camera circle his blondined head like a sparrow looking for a place to deposit its droppings.
Robert Brustein
#96. You'd never play Hamlet if you started worrying about who's played it before you.
Matthew Macfadyen
#97. If 'Hamlet' had been written in these days it would probably have been called 'The Strange Affair at Elsinore.
James M. Barrie
#98. You think back and you ask yourself why you became so interested in wolves. I think it was because when I was very small, growing up in a little hamlet near Shap, we would go to Lowther Wildlife Park for birthday parties. Now closed, it was only three miles from my parents' house.
Sarah Hall
#99. Shakespeare's 'Othello' was inspired by Cinthio's 'A Moorish Captain'; his 'Hamlet' came from Saxo Grammaticus's 'Amleth.'
Malorie Blackman
#100. The ordinary price paid for a new play was less than seven pounds; Oldys, on what authority is not known, says that Shakespeare received only five pounds for "Hamlet.
William Shakespeare
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