Appearance versus Reality Quotes in Hamlet

My father’s spirit in arms! All is not well; / I doubt some foul play: would the night were come! / Till then sit still, my soul: foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.

Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, / Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state, / Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, / With one auspicious and one dropping eye, / With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole, / Taken to wife;

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.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us! / Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d, / Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, / Be thy intents wicked or charitable, / Thou com’st in such a questionable shape / That I will speak to thee.

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

O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!

My lord, as I was sewing in my chamber, / Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd, / No hat upon his head, his stockings foul'd, / Ungart'red, and down-gyved to his ankle, / Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, / And with a look so piteous in purport / As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors, he comes before me.

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.