Hamlet 2 Quotes

After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. ~ William Shakespeare

My liege, and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. ~ William Shakespeare

Rashly,
And praised be rashness for it
let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will ~ William Shakespeare

But did not Shakespeare say a man can smile, and smile, and be a villain? ~ Stephen King

Like, that was weird in 'Hamlet 2,' because I played myself there, fully myself, but then I realized, 'Oh, I'm not playing myself. I'm some weird version of myself.' So as an actress, you're always playing something, I don't even know who I am, how could I become me? I don't know what that is. ~ Elisabeth Shue

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words. ~ William Shakespeare

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. ~ William Shakespeare

Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks. ~ William Shakespeare

This is the very ecstasy of love. ~ William Shakespeare

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm ~ William Shakespeare

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

To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand. ~ William Shakespeare

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. ~ William Shakespeare

Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

More matter with less art. ~ William Shakespeare

The play's the thing." ~~Hamlet ~ William Shakespeare

...he lifted the fat and frightened hawk onto his fist reciting it passages from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello-- 'but tragedy had to be kept out of the voice'-- and all the sonnets he could remember, whistling hymns to it, playing it Gilbert and Sullivan and Italian opera, and deciding, on reflection, that hawks liked Shakespeare best. ~ Helen Macdonald

I'm not saying that Sam J. Jones was Flash Gordon - there's no such thing. No actor can be the person, that's a bunch of crap. People pay to see an actor be himself, whether he plays Hamlet or whatever. ~ Sam J. Jones

+"I'm sick in the heart."~Hamlet ~ William Shakespeare

Five billion people have played Hamlet. 'To be or not to be.' And how do you do that and find your way into your own journey, your own way of telling it? ~ Annette Bening

Use almost can change the stamp of nature. ~ William Shakespeare

You have to get through the Hamlet hoop as a young actor. Your classical qualifications are based on the quality of your Hamlet. And then, as an older actor, you have to get through the Lear hoop. And I'm approaching the Lear hoop. ~ Derek Jacobi

John Calvin's theology emphasizes the sanctity of conscience, the sanctity of companionate marriage, and the obligation of those in power to attend to the well-being of the people in general, especially the poor. Interestingly, for the interpretation of Hamlet, for example, he forbids even the thought of revenge. This is not the Calvin of myth, but when the Elizabethans read him there was no such myth, nor would there be now, if he were read. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Where is Polonius?
HAMLET
In heaven. Send hither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself. But if indeed you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby. ~ William Shakespeare

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
--Hamlet (I, v, 106) ~ William Shakespeare

Progress had not invaded, science had not enlightened, the little hamlet of Pieuvrot, in Brittany. They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as little as its learning. They toiled hard all the week on the ungrateful soil that yielded them but a bare subsistence in return; they went regularly to mass in the little rock-set chapel on Sundays and saint's days; believed implicitly all that monsieur le cure said to them, and many things which he did not say; and they took all the unknown, not as magnificent but as diabolical ~ Eliza Lynn Linton

No place indeed should murder sanctuarize; Revenge should have no bounds. ~ William Shakespeare

I started to realise that it wasn't for me. Perhaps I didn't have to give my Hamlet before I died, that the world might be an OK place without my Hamlet, in fact. ~ Eric McCormack

Slipping in blood, by his own hand, through pride,
Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus fall.
Upon his bed, however, Shakespeare die,
Having endured them all. ~ Louise Bogan

In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life? ~ Virginia Postrel

Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom. ~ Henning Mankell

To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters. ~ Ernst F. Schumacher

We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us. ~ William Shakespeare

If Hamlet indeed thought not too much but too wisely, then Borges' Homer (who is also
Shakespeare) has thought not too well, but too endlessly. Partly Borges is satirizing Back to Methuselah, but he is also savaging
his own literary idealism. Without rivalry and polemic between the Immortals there is, paradoxically, no life, and literature dies .

For Borges, all theology is a division of fantastic literature. In "The Immortal" he observes with superb irony that despite their
professed belief in immortality, Jews, Christians, and Moslems venerate only this world because they truly believe only in it and bind future states to it only as rewards or punishments. ~ Harold Bloom

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother's milk and blackens it to make printer's ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist's work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creatio ~ George Bernard Shaw

Lay her i' the earth: And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest, A ministering angel shall my sister be, When thou liest howling. HAMLET. What, the fair Ophelia! QUEEN GERTRUDE. Sweets to the sweet: farewell! ~ William Shakespeare

I could make thousands of dollars in Broadway musicals, but among the best experiences I had was doing 'Hamlet' in Milwaukee and a version of 'Cyrano' that my wife wrote for me on a bus-and-truck tour. ~ John Cullum

Hamlet, I will argue, is a play about reading and misreading, about the difficulties of interpretation. ~ William Shakespeare

In a hamlet of ten households, there are bound to be those who are my equal in doing their best for others and in being trustworthy in what they say, but they are unlikely to be as eager to learn as I am. ~ Confucius

I will probably die a misunderstood virgin like Ophelia in HAMLET, only I won't do it by floating down a stream, singing my own mad song. They'll just find me here, on my bed, on a weekend night, my dead body slumped over a homework assignment.
Hopefully they'll discover me before Teeny eats my remains. ~ Stephanie Wardrop

For in the fatness of these pursy times
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg. ~ William Shakespeare

Romeo is the most misunderstood character in literature, I think. He's hardcore to play because he's displaying the characteristics of Hamlet at the beginning, and, well, then everything else happens. ~ Alan Cumming

The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt - even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called. ~ C.S. Lewis

I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's college friends. They have been his companions. They bring with them memories of pleasant days together. At the moment when they come across him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly. Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but the Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness. In the making of fancies and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps playing with action as an artist plays with a theory. He makes himself the spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own words knows them to be but 'words, words, words.' Instead of trying to be the hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own tragedy. He disbelieves in everything, including himself, and yet his doubt helps hi ~ Oscar Wilde

He exists on two planes. He sees the story as He tells it, while He weaves it, shapes it, and sings it. And He stepped inside it. The shadows exist in the painting, the dark corners of grief and trial and wickedness all exist so that He might step inside them, so we could see how low He can stoop. In this story, the Author became flesh and wandered the stage with Hamlet, offering His own life. In this story, the Author heaped all that He loathed, all that displeased Him, all the wrongness of the world, onto Himself. ~ N.D. Wilson

To be or not to be! Hamlet!! I beg to differ! How much more limiting could that question be? How much more restraining could it ever get? Do we only have two possible answers to a question? Do we only have two things to choose from? Are our options so restricted? Are we so grounded? Have we gone color blind? When did our retinas stop seeing the colors of a rainbow? Why do we print our experiences in duotone? In a game of multiple choice questions, how many answers could be correct? What number of choices do we have? Who gives us the options? When do we have to submit our selections? Who decides if we passed or failed? ~ Marwa Rakha

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. ~ William Shakespeare

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu. It's like éternel retour, it's a koan. It's like falling in love and being smashed over and over again.'
'You do, then, fall in love.'
'Only with fictions, I love players, but actors are so ephemeral. And then there's waiting for the perfect part, and being offered it the day after you've committed yourself to something utterly rotten. The remorse, and the envy and the jealousy. An old actor told me if I wanted to stay in the trade I had better kill off envy and jealousy at the start. ~ Iris Murdoch

My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone. ~ William Shakespeare

Who would fardels bear,
To groan and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all; ~ William Shakespeare

Ghost: Murder most foul, as in the best it is. But this most foul, strange and unnatural. ~ William Shakespeare

There is more in the world than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Doctor - or in the Merck Manual. ~ Douglas Preston

I'm not in the advertising business, but I think it would be very nice if people went to see the film Hamlet, because it was made with love and integrity. ~ Julie Christie

Imagine the same scene in HAMLET if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudius. We are all told Claudius will die by drinking the cup. Then Claudius dies choking on a chicken bone at lunch. Then the Queen dies when Horatio shows her the magical Mirror of Death. This mirror appears in no previous scene, nor is it explained why it exists. Then Ophelia summons up the Ghost from Act One and kills it, while she makes a speech denouncing the evils of religion. Ophelia and Hamlet are parted, as it is revealed in the last act that a curse will befall them if they do not part ways. ~ John C. Wright

I've read Hamlet, I know men suffer. ~ Andrea Dworkin