Frailty, thy name is woman!
Act I, Scene 2 · Hamlet
Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems. / ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, / Nor customary suits of solemn black, / Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, / No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, / Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, / Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief, / That can denote me truly.
Act I, Scene 2 · Hamlet
But I have that within which passeth show; / These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
Act I, Scene 2 · Hamlet
O that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! / Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God! O God!
Act I, Scene 2 · Hamlet
He was a man, take him for all in all, / I shall not look upon his like again.
Act I, Scene 2 · Hamlet
A little more than kin, and less than kind.
Act I, Scene 2 · 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.
Act I, Scene 3 · Polonius
Neither a borrower nor a lender be: / For loan oft loses both itself and friend; / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
Act I, Scene 3 · Polonius
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Act I, Scene 5 · Hamlet
The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right.
Act I, Scene 5 · Hamlet
As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on—
Act I, Scene 5 · Hamlet
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life / Now wears his crown.
Act I, Scene 5
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, / I will be brief.
Act II, Scene 2 · Polonius
The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.
Act II, Scene 2 · Hamlet
Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Act II, Scene 2 · Hamlet
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Act II, Scene 2 · Hamlet
To be, or not to be, that is the question: / 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?
Act III, Scene 1 · Hamlet
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, / And enterprises of great pith and moment, / With this regard their currents turn awry / And lose the name of action.
Act III, Scene 1 · Hamlet
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?
Act III, Scene 1 · 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.
The lady protests too much, methinks.
Act III, Scene 2 · Gertrude
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything 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;
Act III, Scene 2 · Hamlet
Our wills and fates do so contrary run / That our devices still are overthrown. / Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
Act III, Scene 2
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; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak.
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
Act III, Scene 3 · Claudius
O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; / It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,— / A brother’s murder!
Act III, Scene 3 · Claudius
Now might I do it pat, now he is praying. / And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven; / And so am I reveng’d. That would be scann’d: / A villain kills my father, and for that / I, his sole son, do this same villain send / To heaven. O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
Act III, Scene 3 · Hamlet
I must be cruel, only to be kind: / Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.
Act III, Scene 4 · Hamlet
O Hamlet, speak no more. / Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul, / And there I see such black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct.
Act III, Scene 4 · Gertrude
Do not forget. This visitation / Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
Act III, Scene 4
How now? A rat? [_Draws._] / Dead for a ducat, dead!
Act III, Scene 4 · Hamlet
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts.
Act IV, Scene 5 · Ophelia
When sorrows come, they come not single spies, / But in battalions.
Act IV, Scene 5 · Claudius
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Act IV, Scene 5 · Ophelia
Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up, / Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes, / As one incapable of her own distress, / Or like a creature native and indued / Unto that element.
Act IV, Scene 7 · Gertrude
There is a willow grows aslant a brook, / That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream. / There with fantastic garlands did she make / Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
Act IV, Scene 7 · Gertrude
No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize; / Revenge should have no bounds.
Act IV, Scene 7 · Claudius
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Act V, Scene 2 · Horatio
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story.
Act V, Scene 2 · Hamlet
The rest is silence.
Act V, Scene 2 · Hamlet
Not a whit, we defy augury. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.
Act V, Scene 2 · Hamlet
Act III, Scene 1 · Hamlet
Act III, Scene 2 · Hamlet