Top 100 The Hamlet Quotes
#1. 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
#2. At the close of the day when the hamlet is still, and mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove, when naught but the torrent is heard on the hill, and naught but the nightingale's song in the grove.
James Beattie
#3. Twilight's soft dews steal o'er the village-green, With magic tints to harmonize the scene. Stilled is the hum that through the hamlet broke When round the ruins of their ancient oak The peasants flocked to hear the minstrel play, And games and carols closed the busy day.
Samuel Rogers
#4. 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
#5. Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Thomas Gray
#6. Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.
Kenneth Clark
#7. 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
#9. We remake 'Hamlet' all the time. That's sort of what we do, humans.
Joel Kinnaman
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. You have to learn the language of Hamlet.
Edward Bond
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.
Carol Zaleski
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.
Hugh Kingsmill
#44. The stage can be defined as a place where Shakespeare murdered Hamlet and a great many Hamlets murdered Shakespeare.
Robert Morse
#45. You're wallowing in guilt and he's playing the martyr. It's like living in the middle of Hamlet.
Susan Mallery
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Quebec from the boat looked like the ramparts where Hamlet's ghost might have walked.
Charlie Chaplin
#52. 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
#53. What a silly, frail, and forward pieces are the best of men (647)!
Richard Baxter
#54. How can one deduce the cause of "Hamlet" or "Saint Matthew's Passion"? What is the cause of inspiration?
William F. Buckley Jr.
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
John E. Douglas
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Shakespeare without Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet would be all too much like Hamlet without the prince.
Brand Blanshard
#65. 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
#66. If 'Hamlet' had been written in these days it would probably have been called 'The Strange Affair at Elsinore.
James M. Barrie
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. Brad Dourif as Charles Lee Ray, it's impossible to imagine anyone else in that role. I mean, he's just so great. Over the course of the five movies, he always just takes it so seriously, doesn't condescend to the material, whatsoever and just treats it as if he was playing Hamlet.
David Kirschner
#72. What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.
Robert Gottlieb
#73. I had no one, but Hamlet. Who hated me with the fire of a thousand suns.
Cora Carmack
#74. 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
#75. Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.
Harold Bloom
#76. Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.
Adam Gopnik
#77. 'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.
Meghan O'Rourke
#78. 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
#79. Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
Jean Genet
#80. I saw Hamlet Prince of Denmark played; but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age.
John Evelyn
#81. 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
#83. Yes, a ghost, thought the Count, as he moved silently down the hall. Like Hamlet's father roaming the ramparts of Elsinore after the midnight watch . . . Or like Akaky Akakievich, that forsaken spirit of Gogol's who in the wee hours haunted the Kalinkin Bridge in search of his stolen coat . . . Why
Amor Towles
#84. Could Hamlet have been written bya committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the NewTestament have been composed as a conference report?
Alfred Whitney Griswold
#85. Yes, it's annoying that Hamlet doesn't kill his stepfather ten minutes into the play, but if he did kill his stepfather ten minutes into the play, there wouldn't be a play. He has to be annoying, if you will, and not do what would be the thing to do.
Dallas Roberts
#86. 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
#87. 'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.
Michael Sheen
#88. 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
#89. Ghost: Murder most foul, as in the best it is. But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
William Shakespeare
#90. Hamlet is every man's self-love with all its dreams realized. He wears all the crowns and carries every cross.
Hugh Kingsmill
#91. Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
William Butler Yeats
#92. There is more in the world than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Doctor - or in the Merck Manual.
Douglas Preston
#93. Many actors want to play Hamlet and Macbeth. Ever since I became an actor, from the very beginning I just wanted to play a Shetland pony. I cannot explain why
Dustin Hoffman
#94. The longer I've been doing this, the more I've realized that you have no idea what kinds of roles are possible for you - dream roles can take you by surprise. That being said, I need to play Hamlet one day. I'd also love to be in a play that I have written myself.
Jake Epstein
#95. 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
#96. Newton led a discussion of Hamlet's observation that, to those who see it that way, all the world is a prison. HAMLET:
Laura Bates
#97. I've seen 'Hamlet' many times, and Hamlet, he was just a hideous neurotic; he never changes. He doubts - all the way to the end, all the way until when he dies, he doubts.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#98. I'm not saying that Sam J. Jones was Flash Gordon - there's no such thing. No actor can be the person, that's a bunch of crap. People pay to see an actor be himself, whether he plays Hamlet or whatever.
Sam J. Jones
#99. Hamlet is a remarkably easy role. Physically it's hard because it tends to be about three hours long and you're talking the whole time. But it's a simple role and it adapts itself very well, because the thing about Hamlet is, we all are Hamlet.
Liev Schreiber
#100. 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
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