Top 100 Quotes About Hamlet
#1. I can never forget that Chinese student I knew in Paris - Mr. Tcheou, I think it was. One day, upon asking him if he had ever read Hamlet, he answered: "You mean that novel by Jack London?
Henry Miller
#2. ROSENCRANTZ My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king.
HAMLET The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing -
GUILDENSTERN A thing my lord?
HAMLET Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after!
William Shakespeare
#4. Romeo is the most misunderstood character in literature, I think. He's hardcore to play because he's displaying the characteristics of Hamlet at the beginning, and, well, then everything else happens.
Alan Cumming
#5. Doubt thou that the stars are fire; Doubt thou that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt that I love. - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
Jodi Picoult
#6. Good Gad! It looks like the last act of Hamlet in here.
Turnip banged his head against his clenched fists, making inarticulate moaning noises.
Pinchingdale gave him an odd look. 'I had no idea you felt so strongly about the play, Fitzhugh.
Lauren Willig
#7. If I have to do battle with you a thousand times to prove my point, I'll do it.'
The queen unwisely asked, 'But to prove what point, my dear Hamlet?'
'That I loved Ophelia! Fifty thousand brothers, with all the love they can summon, would not equal my love for here. Ophelia, Ophelia.
John Marsden
#8. I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#9. I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.
Harvey Korman
#10. When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#11. I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.
Quentin Crisp
#12. As Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, had said in Shakespeare's immortal words, 'I must be cruel only to be kind.
Pranab Mukherjee
#13. The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.
Harold Bloom
#14. HAMLET
I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?
GUILDENSTERN
My lord, I cannot.
HAMLET
I pray you.
GUILDENSTERN
Believe me, I cannot.
HAMLET
I do beseech you.
GUILDENSTERN
I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET
It is as easy as lying.
William Shakespeare
#15. He looked at me the way you'd look at a poodle that suddenly started reciting Hamlet.
Serra Elinsen
#16. It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.
David Foster Wallace
#17. It's extraordinary to think that if you walked into a room and said you had never heard of Hamlet, you would be regarded as a Philistine. But you could walk into the same room and say, 'I don't know what a proton is,' and people would just laugh and say, 'Why should you know?'
Robert Winston
#18. We need more bodies, 'cause it's not looking enough like the last scene in Hamlet already.
Chopper Jim Chopin
Dana Stabenow
#19. If you were to ask everyone what 'Hamlet' was about, they might say, "It's about a prince, and he says, 'To be or not to be.'"
Orlando Bloom
#20. Critchley and Webster's fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simpleminded.
Hari Kunzru
#21. 'Born to play? Hmmm. Probably Romeo ... or Hamlet, I guess. Also, I'd be a great Alexander the Great.
David Carradine
#22. Like, that was weird in 'Hamlet 2,' because I played myself there, fully myself, but then I realized, 'Oh, I'm not playing myself. I'm some weird version of myself.' So as an actress, you're always playing something, I don't even know who I am, how could I become me? I don't know what that is.
Elisabeth Shue
#23. Both Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and reflective by habit. Both may even be called, in a popular sense, philosophic; Brutus may be called so in a stricter sense.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#24. Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.
Ray Bradbury
#25. Danny strolled to the town common, sat on one of the benches in Teenytown and took one of the bottles out of the bag, looking down on it like Hamlet with Yorick's skull
Stephen King
#26. I have no desire to play King Lear or Hamlet. I never had a grand ambition. I just followed my nose.
Liam Neeson
#27. Hamlet would worry about having nothing to worry about if he had nothing to worry about,
Jasper Fforde
#28. 'Hamlet' is obviously a role a lot of actors want to portray or be involved with in some way and that I'd like to be involved in.
Jamie Campbell Bower
#29. I look forward to the day when indigenous actors can play Hamlet and Ophelia and not just Othello and Desdemona.
Shari Sebbens
#30. A dutiful son has to remember not to slouch or swear or, in Hamlet's case, murder the old bat.
Mark Forsyth
#31. If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?
James Joyce
#32. Imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.
Hector Berlioz
#33. You have to get through the Hamlet hoop as a young actor. Your classical qualifications are based on the quality of your Hamlet. And then, as an older actor, you have to get through the Lear hoop. And I'm approaching the Lear hoop.
Derek Jacobi
#34. Then, as we turned the final curve past the abandoned little hamlet of Ballydubh, with the village almost out of sight, he forced me to turn around and take in the full sweep of the mountains and the sea. "And there", he said, "is your An Clohan. You had best said good-bye, now.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
#35. And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool.
Gunter Grass
#36. The playbill, which is said to have announced the tragedy of Hamlet, the character of the Prince of Denmark being left out.
Walter Scott
#37. It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser, though he has lost and I think that is the lesson of tragedy.
Alain De Botton
#38. To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, I wish I had known this some time ago.
Roger Zelazny
#39. Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.
Henning Mankell
#40. It seemed to us that all people to a greater or lesser degree belong to one of these two types, that almost every one of us resembles either Don Quixote or Hamlet.
Ivan Turgenev
#41. Do not feed that beggar. Hamlet, lie down." The dog ignored her.
"Down," Viktor ordered, his deep voice stern. The dog whined and then lay down. The prince looked at her. "You need to be more forceful."
"I suppose my forcefulness will improve once my voice changes. Sopranos get no respect.
Patricia Grasso
#42. While tentbound high on Everest, Mallory and his companions would read aloud to one another from Hamlet and King Lear
Jon Krakauer
#43. The music I was writing for 'Hamlet' needed to be very simple because there was so much going on with the dialogue in that play, so I felt like the music had to complement that - so that carried on through; I was working on the soundtrack and the album simultaneously.
Sarah Blasko
#44. I not only loved studying theater, I loved being a theater major. It gave me an excuse to brood, to grow a beard, to wear black 'at' people. I didn't just want to play Hamlet, I wanted to be Hamlet.
Stephen Colbert
#45. Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.
David Mitchell
#46. Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.
Thomas Carlyle
#47. Most people don't see Hamlet as an old bald guy.
Joss Whedon
#48. Hamlet: Farewell, dear mother
Claudius: Thy loving father, Hamlet
Hamlet: My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh; so my mother.
William Shakespeare
#49. Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Thomas Gray
#50. Visually speaking, nothing calls Shakespeare to mind like Hamlet holding Yorick's skull.
Ian Doescher
#51. There is a kitsch of death. For example, death transformed into sweet sleep: The 'good night, sweet prince' of the last scene of Hamlet.
Saul Friedlander
#52. The cast of Hamlet had not moved much. They had that haunted yet hopeful look in their eyes, like the ones you see in photographs of people crammed into steerage compartments, traveling to some new, unknown land.
Maureen Johnson
#53. That thing that Hamlet says - "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so". Not quite true if you are stuck under a grand piano, not quite true for genocide, but surely it must be true about love?
Deborah Meyler
#54. Most people don't know that I am an accomplished dramatic actor ... But I've performed in several Shakespeare productions including Hamlet, except in this version, Hamlet lives in an apartment with two women, and has to pretend he's gay so that the landlord won't evict him.
John Ritter
#55. Hamlet, I will argue, is a play about reading and misreading, about the difficulties of interpretation.
William Shakespeare
#56. I look at it like this: that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written two or three plays about the Kennedy family, and actors would traditionally play JFK like they Hamlet or King Lear. They just would. I mean, people have played JFK, and they'll play him long after I have.
Rob Lowe
#57. They waited, none of them entirely convinced that the old man wouldn't appear before them again like the ghost of Hamlet's father or Jacob Marley or some other ...
Stephen King
#58. How can I come this far and not tell him-he, who would understand it best-that by giving me that flyer, by inviting me to skip Hamlet, he helped me realize that it's not to be that matters, but how to be?
How can I come this far and not be brave?
Gayle Forman
#59. Amanda raised her glass in a toast. "Here's a wet one to Saint Iris of the Hummocks!" Then she winced and scowled at Riker, who had kicked her under the table. Polly raised her glass and quoted from Hamlet: "And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Lilian Jackson Braun
#60. I could make thousands of dollars in Broadway musicals, but among the best experiences I had was doing 'Hamlet' in Milwaukee and a version of 'Cyrano' that my wife wrote for me on a bus-and-truck tour.
John Cullum
#61. I was playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and it was my turn to speak. Dorothy is Hamlet for girls.
Amy Poehler
#63. Sorry," [Hamlet] said, rubbing his temples. "I don't know what came over me. All of a sudden I had this overwhelming desire to talk for a very long time without actually doing anything.
Jasper Fforde
#64. I'm just an entertainer. All I want to be is funny. I never aspired to play Hamlet.
Danny Kaye
#65. As Hamlet says, Hercules may lay about him with his club in every possible direction, but he can't prevent the cats from making a most intolerable row on the roofs of the houses, or the dogs from being shot in the hot weather if they run about the streets unmuzzled
Charles Dickens
#66. The neurotic thinks himself both Hamlet and Claudius, in a world that belongs to Polonius.
Mignon McLaughlin
#67. People of a certain age look back on the Mayberry of 'The Andy Griffith Show' and become almost as homesick for that simple fictional hamlet as they do for their own home towns.
Tom Shales
#68. She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft.
Victor Hugo
#69. It makes you a better person to know where you came from, because whereever you go, there is somebody in some town, city, hamlet, whatever, that has the same dreams you have.
Jamie Farr
#70. I'm as happy doing 'Postman Pat' as I am doing 'Hamlet.'
David Tennant
#71. I took the role of Ophelia in Hamlet because she is so naive, loving, and innocent.
Julia Stiles
#72. I have no problems with remakes, and I think it's interesting. I mean, coming from the theater, we've been remaking 'Hamlet' for a hundred years, so it's no problem to me at all. A good story can be told in many different ways in different places; I just think it's interesting.
Baltasar Kormakur
#73. Lay her i' the earth: And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest, A ministering angel shall my sister be, When thou liest howling. HAMLET. What, the fair Ophelia! QUEEN GERTRUDE. Sweets to the sweet: farewell!
William Shakespeare
#74. Doing Shakespeare in the Park has always been a dream. Everyone else says Hamlet, but I want to play Romeo.
Aaron Yoo
#75. I saw Derek Jacobi play Hamlet when I was 17, and he directed me as Hamlet when I was 27, and I directed him as Claudius in 'Hamlet' when I was 35, and I'm hoping we meet again in some other production of Hamlet before we both toddle off.
Kenneth Branagh
#76. If you haven't read Shakespeare's Hamlet yet, it means that you haven't reached the summit of the literature yet!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#77. I'd not really ever expected to play anything like 'Hamlet.' I hadn't seen myself as a natural Hamlet, whatever a natural Hamlet is, and I quickly realised there is no such thing.
Rory Kinnear
#78. In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is - Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#79. Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#80. By this edition of HAMLET I hope to help the student of Shakspere to understand the play - and first of all Hamlet himself, whose spiritual and moral nature are the real material of the tragedy, to
George MacDonald
#81. A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.
Stephen King
#82. Use them after your own honour and dignity; the less they deserve, the more merit in your bounty. - Hamlet to Polonius
William Shakespeare
#83. Actors want to do Shakespeare again and again, or want to do Hamlet. When you hear one guy do Hamlet and another guy do it, it's going to be a whole different experience.
Joshua Bell
#84. I don't think of 'Macbeth' as the villain. I don't think of 'King Lear' as the villain. I don't think of 'Hamlet' as the villain. I don't think of 'Travis Bickle' as the villain.
Damien Chazelle
#85. I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?
Jorge Luis Borges
#86. A cold, miserable little hamlet on the eastern coast of America called Piper's Grave.
Susanna Clarke
#87. There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.
Gustave Flaubert
#88. I became an actress because I discovered the world of the imagination when I was about 14 or so and the concept that you could engage in this amazing world of storytelling. I saw a production of Hamlet, and I didn't know Hamlet died in the end.
Helen Mirren
#89. One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.
Kenneth Branagh
#90. God has given you one face and you make yourself another. - Hamlet
Amy Harmon
#91. The tragedy of "Hamlet" is critically considered to be the masterpiece of dramatic poetry; and the tragedy of "Hamlet" is also, according to the testimony of every sort of manager, the play of all others which can invariably be depended on to fill a theater.
George Augustus Henry Sala
#92. I like drama as well. When I played Hamlet, I got one review that said, "This must surely be the funniest Hamlet in history," but schoolgirls would still cry when he died.
Jason Gann
#93. Perhaps because my background is theatrical, I have a great affinity with the classics. Hamlet has always been a character of great interest to me and a character I would really love to play. Or a character in a Tennessee Williams play, maybe Tom in 'The Glass Menagerie.'
Adhir Kalyan
#94. Why do people always quote hamlet when they want to seem clever?
Alan Bradley
#95. Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.
Kenneth Clark
#96. Hamlet at 70: "To sleep, perchance to dream. To awaken, perchance to go to the bathroom."
Robert Breault
#98. In a hamlet of ten households, there are bound to be those who are my equal in doing their best for others and in being trustworthy in what they say, but they are unlikely to be as eager to learn as I am.
Confucius
#99. My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#100. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern thought, but Hamlet invented it
Oscar Wilde
