Claudius Quotes in Hamlet

Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are reliev'd, / Or not at all.

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,

There’s such divinity doth hedge a king, / That treason can but peep to what it would, / Acts little of his will.—

Poor Ophelia / Divided from herself and her fair judgement, / Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts.

Laertes, was your father dear to you? / Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?

That we would do, / We should do when we would; for this ‘would’ changes, / And hath abatements and delays as many / As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;

I will work him / To an exploit, now ripe in my device, / Under the which he shall not choose but fall; / And for his death no wind shall breathe, / But even his mother shall uncharge the practice / And call it accident.

Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane, / Drink off this potion. Is thy union here? / Follow my mother.

Does it not, thinks’t thee, stand me now upon,— / He that hath kill’d my king, and whor’d my mother, / Popp’d in between th’election and my hopes, / Thrown out his angle for my proper life, / And with such cozenage—is’t not perfect conscience / To quit him with this arm?

But to persevere / In obstinate condolement is a course / Of impious stubbornness. ’Tis unmanly grief, / It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, / A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, / An understanding simple and unschool’d;