50 FAMOUS HAMLET QUOTES (WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE) IN 2020

Table of Contents

Hamlet Quotes

“This above all: to thine own self be true.”
– Polonius, Act I, Scene III

“Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
– Act III, Scene III

“A rhapsody of words.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“I must be cruel, only to be kind.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the King.”
– Act II, Scene II

“To be, or not to be: that is the question.”
– Act III, Scene I

“For ’tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his
own petard.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“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 III

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
– Act I, Scene V

“Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”
– Ophelia , Act III, Scene I

“the rest is silence”
– Hamlet as he dies, Act V, Scene II

“We go to gain a little patch of ground, that hath in it
no profit but the name.”
– Act IV, Scene IV

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t.”
-Act II, Scene II

“Get thee to a nunnery, go.”
– Act III, Scene I

“That it should come to this!”.
– Act I, Scene II

“Lord! we know what we are, but know not what we
may be.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking
makes it so”

Best Hamlet Quotes

– Act II, Scene II

“What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! ”
-Act II, Scene II

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”.
– Act III, Scene II

“In my mind’s eye”.
– Act I, Scene II

“A little more than kin, and less than kind”.
– Act I, Scene II

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince,
and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”
– Act V, Scene II

“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
– Act II, Scene II

“Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are dead.”
– Act V, Scene II

“Sweets to the sweet: farewell!”
– Act V, Scene I

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: A fellow of
infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
– Act V, Scene I

“Give thy thoughts no tongue.”
– Act I, Scene III

“The apparel oft proclaims the man.”
– Act I, Scene III

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
– Act I, Scene IV

“Murder most foul.”
– Act I, Scene V

“More matter, with less art.”
– Act II, Scene II

“To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man
picked out of ten thousand.”
– Act II, Scene II

“And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst
not then be false to any man”.
– Act I, Scene III

“Let Hercules himself do what he may, the cat will
mew and every dog will have his day.”
– Act V, Scene I

“The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.”
– Act II, Scene II

“Let me be cruel, not unnatural; I will speak daggers
to her, but use none.”
– Act III, Scene II

“Come, my coach! Good-night ladies; good night,
sweet ladies; good night.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
but in battalions.”
– Act IV, Scene V

Top Hamlet Quotes

“Frailty, thy name is woman—”
– Act I, Scene II

“I am but mad north-northwest”
– Act II, Scene II

(Used by Alfred Hitchcock for his film title North by
Northwest, denoting appearance versus reality. )

“But to my mind, – though I am native here and to
the manner born, – it is a custom more honoured in
the breach than the observance.”
– Act I, Scene IV

“Unhand me, gentlemen. By heaven, I’ll make a
ghost of him that lets me!”
– Act I, Scene IV

“Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliance
are relieved, or not at all.”
– Act IV, Scene III

“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”
– Claudius, Act III, Scene 1

“Give me that man that is not passion’s slave, and I
will wear him in my heart’s core.”
– Act III, Scene II

“Are you like the painting of a sorrow, a face without
a heart?”
– Claudius, Act IV, Scene VII

“O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!”
– Act I, Scene V

“Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might
stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
– Act V, Scene 1

“There is 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 II

“This is the very ecstasy of love”
– Act II, Scene I

“Do you think I am easier to be played on than a
pipe?” Hamlet Quote
-Act III, Scene II

“All that lives must die, passing through nature to
eternity.”
– Act I, Scene II

To define true madness, what is’t but to be nothing
else but mad?”
– Act II, Scene II

“Our wills and fates do so contrary run that our
devices still are overthrown.”
– Act III, Scene II

“Let the galled jade wince our withers are unwrung.”
– Act III, Scene II

“What! frighted with false fire?”
– Act III, Scene II

“Why, let the stricken deer go weep, the hart
ungalled play; for some must watch, while some
must sleep: so runs the world away.”
– Act III, Scene II

“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.”
– Act III, Scene II

“‘Tis now the very witching time of night…”
– Act III, Scene II

“O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven.”
– Act III, Scene III

“Dead, for a ducat, dead!”
– Act III, Scene IV

“A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother, as kill
a king, and marry with his brother.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! I took
thee for thy better.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“You cannot call it love, for at your age the hey-day
in the blood is tame, it’s humble, and waits upon the
judgment.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“Speak no more; thou turn’st mine eyes into my very
soul”
– Act III, Scene IV

“Confess yourself to heaven; repent what’s past;
avoid what is to come.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an unseamed
bed, stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
over the nasty sty.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, that from a
shelf the precious diadem stole, and put it in his
pocket!”
– Act III, Scene IV

“A king of shreds and patches.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“Mother, for love of grace, lay not that flattering
unction to your soul.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“‘Tis as easy as lying.”
– Act III, Scene II

“By and by is easily said.”
– Act III, Scene II

“Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster,
custom, who all sense doth eat, of habits devil, is
angel yet in this.”
– Act III, Scene IV

“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a
king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”
– Act IV, Scene III

“Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
looking before and after, gave us not that capability
and godlike reason to fust in us unused.”
– Act IV, Scene IV

“Rightly to be great is not to stir without great
argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when
honour’s at the stake.”
– Act IV, Scene IV

“How should I your true love know from another
one? By his cockle hat and staff, and sandal shoon.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone, at
his head a green-grass tuft; at his heels a stone.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day, all in the
morning betime.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“There’s such divinity doth hedge a king, that treason
can but peep to what it would.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray,
love, remember: and there is pansies, that’s for
thoughts.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“His beard was as white as snow.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“His means of death, his obscure burial, no trophy,
sword, nor hatchment o’er his bones, no noble rite
nor formal ostentation.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“And where the offence is let the great axe fall.”
– Act IV, Scene V

“Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your dull ass
will not mend his pace with beating.”
– Act V, Scene I

“But age, with his stealing steps hath clawed me in
his clutch.”
– Act V, Scene I

“The age is grown so picked that the toe of the
peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he
galls his kibe.”
– Act V, Scene I

“To what base uses we may return, Horatio! So
hallow’d and so gracious is the time.”
– Act V, Scene I

“Lay her in the earth; and from her fair and
unpolluted flesh may violets spring!”
– Act V, Scene I

“A ministering angel shall my sister be.”
– Act V, Scene I

“I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.”
– Act V, Scene II

“I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet
maid, and not have strewed thy grave.”
– Act V, Scene I

“Though I am not splenitive and rash, yet have I
something in me dangerous.”
– Act V, Scene I

“I loved Ophelia: Forty thousand brothers could not,
with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.”
– Act V, Scene I

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew
them how we will.”
– Act V, Scene II

“I once did hold it, as our statists do, a baseness to
write fair, and labored much how to forget that
learning; but, sir, now it did me yeoman’s service.”
– Act V, Scene II

“I have shot mine arrow o’er the house, and hurt my
brother.”
– Act V, Scene II

“A hit, a very palpable hit.”
– Act V, Scene II

“I am justly killed with my own treachery.”
– Act V, Scene II

“This fell sergeant, death, is strict in his arrest.”
– Act V, Scene II

“Report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.”
– Act V, Scene II

“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 II