Tush, tush, ’twill not appear.

Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.

A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye.

He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.

This bodes some strange eruption to our state.

But look, the morn in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! Oh fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. 

  Hyperion     Niobe     Hercules    Nemean lion     Niobe   Priam    Hecuba
  Termagant.  out-Herods Herod.      O Jephthah, judge of Israel
  Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light.

Frailty, thy name is woman!

It is not, nor it cannot come to good.

We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.

Thrift, thrift, Horatio!  The funeral bak'd meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

    Foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.

For the apparel oft proclaims the man;

This above all: to thine own self be true;

But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honour'd in the breach than the observance.

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

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

I do not set my life at a pin’s fee;
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself?

He waxes desperate with imagination.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
...Denmark’s a prison.
...you false Danish dogs

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.

so the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abus’d;

O horrible! O horrible! most horrible!

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!

Hic et ubique     [here and everywhere]

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on—

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!

Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern.
Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz.

 brevity is the soul of wit

That he is mad, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity;
And pity 'tis 'tis true.

That we find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause.

To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one
man pick'd out of ten thousand.

Slanders, sir. For the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards; 
that their faces are wrinkled; their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum; 
and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams.

Though this be madness, yet there is a method in't.
...How pregnant sometimes his replies are! 
A happiness that often madness hits on, 
which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.

In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true; she is a strumpet.
...For thou hast been
  As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
  A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
  Hast ta’en with equal thanks. And bles’d are those
  Whose blood and judgment are so well co-mingled
  That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
  To sound what stop she please.
...Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! All you gods,
   In general synod take away her power;
   Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,

there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so

I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space

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.
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?


The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, 
comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, 
tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,

He's for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps

they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time;

God’s bodikin, man, better. Use every man after his desert, 
and who should scape whipping?

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? 

 bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

death,—
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns

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.

The fair Ophelia!—Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?

Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; 
for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.

Let the doors be shut upon him, 
that he may play the fool nowhere but in's own house

There's something in his soul
O'er which his melancholy sits on brood;

Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.

the groundlings, who, for the most part, 
are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise

the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, 
was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature;

Let me be cruel, not unnatural;
I will speak daggers to her, but use none;

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are reliev'd,
Or not at all.

King. Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?
Ham. At supper.
King. At supper? Where?
Ham. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: 
a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. 
Your worm is your only emperor for diet: 
we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: 
your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service,—two dishes,
 but to one table: that's the end.

I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t.

O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

we know what we are, but know not what we may be

When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions!

poor Ophelia
Divided from herself and her fair judgment,
Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts:

1 Clown. What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, 
the shipwright, or the carpenter?
2 Clown. The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.
...
say 'a grave-maker;' the houses he makes last till doomsday. 

That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: 
how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if 'twere Cain's jawbone

 we have many pocky corses now-a-days that will scarce hold the laying in

 and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.


Gravedigger: Here's a skull now. This skull hath lain
    you i' the earth three-and-twenty years.
Hamlet:   Whose was it?
Gravedigger: A whoreson mad fellow's it was. Whose do you think it was?
Hamlet:   Nay, I know not.
Gravedigger: A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! 'E pour'd a flagon of
    Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was Yorick's
    skull, the King's jester.
Hamlet:   This!
Gravedigger: E'en that.
Hamlet: Let me see. 
Alas, poor Yorick!—I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, 
of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; 
and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. 
Here hung those lips that I have kiss'd I know not how oft. 
Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, 
that were wont to set the table on a roar? 
Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? 
Now, get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, 
to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.
Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
Horatio:   What's that, my lord?
Hamlet:    Dost thou think Alexander look'd o' this fashion i' the earth?
Horatio:   E'en so.
Hamlet:    And smelt so? Pah!   [Puts down the skull.]
Horatio:   E'en so, my lord.
Hamlet:    To what base uses we may return, Horatio! 
Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
Hor. 'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.
Ham. No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with
modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it; as thus:
Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; 
the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; 
and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel? 
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, 
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. 
O, that that earth which kept the world in awe 
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!

   I tell thee, churlish priest,
A minist’ring angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling.

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

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: 
since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?
Let be.

 this fell sergeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest,

Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!