Hamlet Quotes

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 dram of evil / Doth all the noble substance of a doubt / To his own scandal.

I am thy father’s spirit, / Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confin’d to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purg’d away.

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, / Unhous’led, disappointed, unanel’d; / No reckoning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head.

So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d, / Will sate itself in a celestial bed / And prey on garbage.

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven, / And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, / To prick and sting her.

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth; / And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, / With windlasses, and with assays of bias, / By indirections find directions out.

This is the very ecstasy of love, / Whose violent property fordoes itself, / And leads the will to desperate undertakings, / As oft as any passion under heaven / That does afflict our natures.