Death and Mortality Quotes in 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.

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!

He was a man, take him for all in all, / I shall not look upon his like again.

What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

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?

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?

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.

’Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood, / And do such bitter business as the day / Would quake to look on.

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.