Hamlet Quotes
More Hamlet Quotes
I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.
Quentin Crisp— Ch. 12 (The Naked Civil Servant (1968))
"Out of the mouth of the Mother of God , More than the doors of doom, I call the muster of Wessex men From grassy Hamlet or ditch or den, To break and be broken, God knows when, But I have seen for whom.
— G. K. Chesterton, in The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), Book II : The Gathering Of The Chiefs
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince.
— 1915 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' (first published in Poetry magazine, collected in Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917).
I saw Hamlet Prince of Denmark played, but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age.
john evelyn— 1661 Diary entry, 26 Nov.
Do you know how they are going to decide the Shakespeare^Bacon dispute? Theyare going to dig up Shakespeareand dig up Bacon; theyaregoing toget Tree to recite Hamlet to them. And the one who turns in his coffin will be the author of the play.
Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert— Letter.
Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report?
Alfred Whitney Griswold— Baccalaureate address, 9 June 1957.
I would rather play Hamlet with no rehearsal than TV golf.
Jack (John Uhler) Lemmon— Quoted in Michael Hobbs The Golf Quotation Book (1992).
Hamlet is every man's self-love with all its dreams realized. He wears all the crowns and carries every cross.
hugh kingsmill— "Hamlet Borgianized", p. 154
Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.
hugh kingsmill— "Hamlet Borgianized", p. 156
King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare — or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.
paul scofield— Quoted in Royah Nikkhah, "Scofield's Lear voted the greatest Shakespeare performance", Telegraph.co.uk (2004-08-22)
Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.
kenneth clark— Ch. Nine: 1513-1519
Hamlet 's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge— 24 June 1827.
When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius , in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet 's Madness.)
stephen jay gould— "The Tallest Tale", p. 304
The playbill, which is said to have announced the tragedy of Hamlet, the character of the Prince of Denmark being left out.
walter scott— The Talisman, Introduction (1825).
The cannons to the heavens, the heavens to earth, "Now the king drinks to Hamlet."
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act V, scene 2, line 288.
Hamlet, being charged with " coinage of the brain" answers: "It is not madness That I have uttered; bring me to the test, And I the matter will re-word; which madness Would gambol from." Madness, then, varies and fluctuates: it cannot "re-word" if the poet's observation be well founded; and though the Court would not at all rely upon it as an authority, yet it knows from the information of a most eminent physician that this test of madness, suggested by this passage, was found, by experiment in a recent case, to be strictly applicable, and discovered the lurking disease.
— Sir John Nicholl, Groom v. Thomas (1829), 2 Hagg. Ecc. Rep. 452, 453; reported in The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 104-05. The reference goes on to say:
The Court was understood to allude to the case referred to in a note to p. 242, of the 10th number of the new series of the Quarterly Journal of Sciences and the Arts, London, 1829. "If the tests of insanity are matters of law, the practice of allowing experts to testify what they are should be discontinued; if they are matters of fact, the Judge should no longer testify without being sworn as a witness and showing himself qualified to testify as an expert."—Doe, J., State v. Pike, 49 New Hamp. Eep. 399 ; 6 Amer. Eep. 584.
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act iii. Sc. 2.
Hamlet: The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold. Horatio: It is a nipping and an eager air.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act i, scene 4.
This is I, Hamlet the Dane!
— Hamlet, scene i
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage.
— Fortinbras, scene ii
This isn't Hamlet , you know. It's not meant to go into the bloody ear.
— Who: Actor Laurence Olivier supposedly said this when a nurse, attempting to moisten his lips, mis-aimed.
— Note: In Shakespeare's play Hamlet, the title character's father is killed when poison is dripped into his ear while asleep.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the Hamlet sleep. The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn, The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
thomas gray— 1751Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, l.13-20.
Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude Forefathers of the Hamlet sleep.
thomas gray— St. 4. (Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750))
