Hamlet Act 1-2 Quotes

Terms in this set (24)

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, / Or that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God, God, / How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!

This above all, to thine own self be true, / And it must follow as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man.

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?

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! / Is it not monstrous that this player here, / But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, / Could force his soul so to his own conceit / That from her working all his visage wanned; / Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, / A broken voice, and his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing, / For Hecuba!

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Though this be madness, yet there is no method in't.

I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

"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 forced breath,/
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,/Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,/Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,/That can denote me truly.

We pray you, throw to earth/This unprevailing woe, and think of us/As of a father.

Frailty, thy name is woman!

A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye./In the most high and palmy state of Rome,/A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,/The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead/Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets/As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,/Disasters in the sun, and the moist star/Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands/Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,/Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,/Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,/Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads./And recks not his own rede.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

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

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

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

Affection, puh! You speak like a green girl/Unsifted in such perilous circumstance...

Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a blessing but, as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to 't.

But know, thy noble youth, /the serpent that did sting thy father's life/now wears his crown.

Ghost of King Hamlet

So excellent a king, that this was to this/Hyperion to a satyr.../Must I remember?

More matter with less art.

Upon our first, he sent out to suppress
His nephew's levies, which to him appeared/To be a preparation 'gainst the Polack,/But, better looked into, he truly found/It was against your highness. Whereat grieved—
That so his sickness, age, and impotence/Was falsely borne in hand—sends out arrests/On Fortinbras

My dread lord,/Your leave and favor to return to France,/From whence though willingly I came to Denmark/To show my duty in your coronation,/Yet now, I must confess, that duty done,/My thoughts and wishes bend again toward France/And bow them to your gracious leave and pardon.

My lord, he hath importuned me with love/In honorable fashion.

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