Top 100 Shakespeare Hamlet Quotes
#2. To persevere
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness: 'tis unmanly grief.
William Shakespeare
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.
William Shakespeare
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.
Carol Zaleski
#25. Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?
Robert A. Heinlein
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?
Brendan Fraser
#31. The stage can be defined as a place where Shakespeare murdered Hamlet and a great many Hamlets murdered Shakespeare.
Robert Morse
#33. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
John E. Douglas
#43. Shakespeare without Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet would be all too much like Hamlet without the prince.
Brand Blanshard
#44. Shakespeare's 'Othello' was inspired by Cinthio's 'A Moorish Captain'; his 'Hamlet' came from Saxo Grammaticus's 'Amleth.'
Malorie Blackman
#45. 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
#46. I am haunted by the ghost of my father, I think that should allow me to quote Hamlet as much as I please.
Erin Morgenstern
#48. In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law. . .
(Claudius, from Hamlet, Act 3, scene 3)
William Shakespeare
#50. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
William Shakespeare
#51. PROLOGUE:
For us and for our tragedy,
Here stooping to your clemency,
We beg your hearing patiently.
HAMLET:
Is this a prologue or the posy of a ring?
William Shakespeare
#53. And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.
Julie Taymor
#55. He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone.
William Shakespeare
#56. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass..." Hamlet.
William Shakespeare
#58. Our son shall win.
QUEEN-He is fat and scant of breath. Here Hamlet, Wipe thy brow.
William Shakespeare
#59. No one pretends that Shakespeare was (divinely) inspired, and yet all the writers of the books of the Old Testament put together, could not have produced Hamlet.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#60. If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.
William Monahan
#61. I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.
Nathalie Sarraute
#62. Ghost: Murder most foul, as in the best it is. But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
William Shakespeare
#64. There is more in the world than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Doctor - or in the Merck Manual.
Douglas Preston
#66. In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, "to be, or not to be, that is the question." In the 21st century, "to code, or not to code, that is the challenge.
Newton Lee
#67. A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#68. Mad I call it, for to define true madness, what is't to be nothing else but mad?
William Shakespeare
#70. The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.
Trevor Nunn
#71. King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare - or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.
Paul Scofield
#72. I've always wanted to give 'Hamlet' a shot. It's the big one, you know. I haven't done Shakespeare professionally, so I think it would be terrifying.
Brian D'Arcy James
#74. 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
#76. 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
#77. As Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, had said in Shakespeare's immortal words, 'I must be cruel only to be kind.
Pranab Mukherjee
#78. 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
#79. Critchley and Webster's fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simpleminded.
Hari Kunzru
#81. 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
#82. To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, I wish I had known this some time ago.
Roger Zelazny
#83. 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
#84. It is something to have gazed on the constellated white,
felt it running from the eyes and the pores: the salt of love.
It is something to have whispered wild thank-yous
in the only ways we know how.
Bryana Johnson
#85. 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
#86. It's a pity that the rich have more freedom to hang or drown themselves than the rest of us Christians.
William Shakespeare
#87. Visually speaking, nothing calls Shakespeare to mind like Hamlet holding Yorick's skull.
Ian Doescher
#88. This is the very coinage of your brain: this bodiless creation ecstasy.
William Shakespeare
#89. 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
#90. Hamlet, I will argue, is a play about reading and misreading, about the difficulties of interpretation.
William Shakespeare
#94. 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
#96. Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, bear t that th' opposed may beware of thee.
William Shakespeare
#98. For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.
William Shakespeare
#99. 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
#100. Doing Shakespeare in the Park has always been a dream. Everyone else says Hamlet, but I want to play Romeo.
Aaron Yoo
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