POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words.
Hamlet, II, ii
POLONIUS: Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
HAMLET: Into my grave.
POLONIUS: Indeed, that is out o' the air.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: What's the news?
ROSENCRANTZ: None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest.
HAMLET: Then is doomsday near.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there
is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: I have of late -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: Man delights not me -- no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
Hamlet, II, ii
POLONIUS: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: For the play, I remember, pleased not the million; 'twas caviare to the general.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: 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.
Hamlet, II, ii
POLONIUS: My lord, I will use them according to their desert.
HAMLET: God's bodikin, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: What's Hecuba to him, or he to
Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: For murder, though it have no tongue,
will speak
With most miraculous organ.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.
Hamlet, II, ii
HAMLET: To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Hamlet, III, i
HAMLET: 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.
Hamlet, III, i
HAMLET: To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
Hamlet, III, i
HAMLET: 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.
Hamlet, III, i
HAMLET: 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?
Hamlet, III, i
HAMLET: Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd 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?
Hamlet, III, i
HAMLET: Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
Hamlet, III, i
OPHELIA: Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
Hamlet, III, i
HAMLET: Get thee to a nunnery.
Hamlet, III, i
HAMLET: What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us.
Hamlet, III, i
HAMLET: I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.
Hamlet, III, i
OPHELIA: O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
Hamlet, III, i
CLAUDIUS: Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.
Hamlet, III, i
HAMLET: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I
pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue.
Hamlet, III, ii
HAMLET: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.
Hamlet, III, ii
HAMLET: Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature.
Hamlet, III, ii
HAMLET: For any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
Hamlet, III, ii
HAMLET: 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.
Hamlet, III, ii
HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA: No, my lord.
HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet, III, ii
HAMLET: Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?
OPHELIA: 'Tis brief, my lord.
HAMLET: As woman's love.
Hamlet, III, ii
PLAYER QUEEN: Where love is great, the
littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.
Hamlet, III, ii
PLAYER KING: Purpose is but the slave to memory.
Hamlet, III, ii
GERTRUDE: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Hamlet, III, ii
HORATIO: You might have rhymed.
Hamlet, III, ii
HAMLET: 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, and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.
Hamlet, III, ii
HAMLET: For some must watch, while some must
sleep:
So runs the world away.
Hamlet, III, ii
HAMLET: 'Tis now the very witching time of
night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.
Hamlet, III, ii
ROSENCRANTZ: The cess of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it.
Hamlet, III, iii
CLAUDIUS: 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: but 'tis not so above.
Hamlet, III, iii
GERTRUDE: This is the very coinage of your
brain.
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in.
Hamlet, III, iv
HAMLET: I must be cruel, only to be kind.
Hamlet, III, iv
HAMLET: Let it work.
For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard, and 't shall go hard.
Hamlet, III, iv
CLAUDIUS: What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?
GERTRUDE: Mad as the sea and wind, when both
contend
Which is the mightier.
Hamlet, IV, i
CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?
HAMLET: At supper.
CLAUDIUS: At supper? Where?
HAMLET: Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him.
Hamlet, IV, iii
HAMLET: Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.
Hamlet, IV, iii
CLAUDIUS: Where is Polonius?
HAMLET: In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger find him not there, seek him i' the other place yourself.
Hamlet, IV, iv
HAMLET: How all occasions do inform against
me,
And spur my dull revenge!
Hamlet, IV, iv
HAMLET: What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.
Hamlet, IV, iv
HAMLET: How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?
Hamlet, IV, iv
GENTLEMAN: Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they yawn at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts.
Hamlet, IV, v