Hamlet Quotes

HAMLET

On Claudius

• 
  
• “A little more than kin, and less than kind”
• “Smiling, damned villain!”
• “Keeps wassail” “drains his draughts of Rhenish down”
• “Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!”
• “what, frighted with false fire!”

On Polonius

• 
  
• “these tedious old fools”
• “i’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room”
• “you are a fishmonger”
• “thou wretched rash, intruding fool, farewell.”

On Gertrude/Ophelia/Women

• 
  
• “i shall in my best obey you madam”
• “Like Niobe, all tears”
• “incestuous sheets”
• “the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables”
• “Frailty, thy name is Woman”
• “Get thee to a nunnery”
• “Wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them”
• “I have heard of your paintings too,God has given you one face and you paint
  yourself another”
• “Mother, you have my father much offended”
• “you jig, you amble, and you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures”
• “I will speak daggers to her, but i shall use none”

Self loathing/suicide/death

• 
  
• “O that this too too solid flesh would melt”
• “Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd his canon 'gainst self-slaughter”
• “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable”
• “To be or not to be”
• “I am pigeon-livered and lack gall”
• “Denmark’s a prison”
• “contagion to this world”
• “'tis an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in
  nature/ Possess it merely”
• “That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once”
• “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,/Might stop a hole to keep the
  wind away”

Revenge/Action/Inaction/Ruthlessness

• 
  
• “I am pigeon-livered and lack gall”
• “Am I a coward?”
• “proud, revengeful, ambitious”
• “the play’s the thing/ Wherein i’ll catch the conscience of the king”
• “thinking too precisely on the event”
• “a thought which quartered hath but one part wisdom, And ever three parts
  coward”
• “O from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth”
• “they are not near my conscience” (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern)

Madness

• 
  
• “to put an antic disposition on”
• “mad in craft”
• “we”
• “i am but mad north-north west, when the wind is southerly i know a hawk
  from a handsaw”
• “O What a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”
• “I will be brief; your noble son is mad.”
• “Madness in great ones shall not unwatched go”
• “i did love you once”...”i loved you not”
• “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t”
• Gertrude - "Alas, he is mad"
• “this is the very coinage of your brain”
• Polonius - "The ecstacy of love" (The cause of Hamlets madness)
• Claudius - "his easily excitable mind"
• Ophelia - "A great mind o'erthrown"

Revenge

Hamlet

• 
  
• “I am pigeon-livered and lack gall”
• “Am I a coward?”
• “proud, revengeful, ambitious”
• “the play’s the thing/ Wherein i’ll catch the conscience of the king”
• “A villain kills my father, and for that i his sole son do this same villain
  send/ To heaven”
• “thinking too precisely on the event”
• “a thought which quartered hath but one part wisdom, And ever three parts
  coward”
• “O from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth”
• “O cursed spite/ That…