Elsinore Castle Quotes — Hamlet

I have heard / That guilty creatures sitting at a play, / Have by the very cunning of the scene, / Been struck so to the soul that presently / They have proclaim’d their malefactions.

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.

Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive.

More matter, with less art.

Is it not monstrous that this player here, / But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, / Could force his soul so to his own conceit / That from her working all his visage wan’d; / Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect, / A broken voice, and his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! / For Hecuba?

O ’tis too true! / How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience! / The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plastering art, / Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it / Than is my deed to my most painted word.

Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! / The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, / Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / Th’observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down!

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, / The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, / The pangs of dispriz’d 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?

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.