Act I, Scene 3 Quotes — Hamlet

This above all: to thine own self be true; / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be: / For loan oft loses both itself and friend; / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

Do not as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; / Whilst like a puff’d and reckless libertine / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, / And recks not his own rede.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;

For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour, / Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood; / A violet in the youth of primy nature, / Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting; / The perfume and suppliance of a minute; / No more.

The canker galls the infants of the spring / Too oft before their buttons be disclos’d, / And in the morn and liquid dew of youth / Contagious blastments are most imminent.

The chariest maid is prodigal enough / If she unmask her beauty to the moon.

His greatness weigh’d, his will is not his own; / For he himself is subject to his birth: / He may not, as unvalu’d persons do, / Carve for himself; for on his choice depends / The sanctity and health of this whole state;

Give thy thoughts no tongue, / Nor any unproportion’d thought his act.

Ay, springes to catch woodcocks. I do know, / When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul / Lends the tongue vows: these blazes, daughter, / Giving more light than heat, extinct in both, / Even in their promise, as it is a-making, / You must not take for fire.