Top 50 Quotes You Need for Your Essay from Hamlet

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#11: “[Revenge] warms the very sickness of my heart”

• Act 4, Scene 7
• Techniques: Dramatic foil, personification
• Characters: Laertes (speaker), King Claudius

#12: “To cut his throat I’ the church”

• Act 4, Scene 7
• Techniques: Parataxis, truncated sentence, declarative tone
• Characters: Laertes (speaker), King Claudius, Hamlet

Appearance VS Reality

#13: “With mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage”

• Act 1, Scene 2
• Techniques: Antithesis, paradox, contrast
• Characters: King Claudius (speaker), Gertrude

#14: “Why seems it so particular with thee?”

• Act 1, Scene 2
• Techniques: Euphemism, motif
• Characters: Queen Gertrude (speaker), Hamlet

#15: “This above all, to thine own self be true.”

• Act 1, Scene 3
• Techniques: Irony
• Characters: Polonius (speaker), Laertes

#16: “The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen”

• Act 1, Scene 5
• Techniques: Motif, characterisation
• Character: Ghost (Speaker), Hamlet

#17: “The serpent that did sting thy fathers life / Now wears his crown”

• Act 1, Scene 5
• Techniques: Metaphor, biblical reference
• Characters: Ghost (speaker), King Claudius, Hamlet

#18: “To put an antic disposition on,”

• Act 1, Scene 5
• Techniques: Euphemism, foreshadowing
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker)

#19: “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, / I know a hawk from a handsaw”

• Act 2, Scene 2
• Techniques: Free verse, repetition, consonance
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

#20: “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go”

• 3,现场1
• Techniques: Metonymy
• Characters: King Claudius (speaker), Polonius

#21: “Do it, England; / For like the hectic in my blood he rages / And thou must cure me”

• Act 4, Scene 3
• Techniques: Simile, metonymy
• Characters: King Claudius (speaker)

#22: “Laertes was your father dear to you? / Or are you like a painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?”

• Act 4, Scene 7
• Techniques: Dramatic foil, metaphor, rhetorical question, coercive tone
• Characters: King Claudius (speaker), Laertes

Freewill VS Determinism

# 23:“如果tempt you toward the flood, my lord, / Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff…deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness?”

• Act 1, Scene 4
• Techniques: Foreshadowing, metaphor, iambic pentameter
• Characters: Horatio (Speaker), Ghost, Hamlet

#24: “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, / that I was born to ever set it right!”

• Act 1, Scene 5
• Techniques: Rhyme, symbolism
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker)

#25: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason…—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

• Act 2, Scene 2
• Techniques: Rhetorical question, memento mori (“dust”)
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker)

#26: “To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream”

• 3,现场1
• Techniques: Tricolon, metaphor (“dream”)
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker)

#27: “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/And, by opposing, end them.”

• 3,现场1
• Techniques: Soliloquy, metaphor
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker)

#28: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,/ might stop a hole, to keep the wind away”

• 5,场景1
• Techniques: Historical allusion, rhyme, iambic pentameter
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Horatio

#29: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest,… Where be your gibes now? your/gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?”

• 5,场景1
• Techniques: Memento mori, free verse, caesura
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Yorick, Horatio

#30: “Is’t not to be damned/ To let this canker of out nature come / in further evil?”

• Act 5, Scene 2
• Techniques: Metaphor, biblical reference
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Horatio

#31: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends”

• Act 5, Scene 2
• Techniques: Biblical reference, double entendre (“ends”)
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Horatio

#32: “There’s a special / providence in a fall of a sparrow”

• Act 5, Scene 2
• Techniques: Biblical reference, metaphor, metonym
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Horatio

#33: “The rest is silence.”

• Act 5, Scene 2
• Techniques: Parataxis, metaphor
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Horatio

Corruption

#34: “And I am sick at heart”

• Act 1, Scene 1
• Techniques: Metaphor, motif
• Characters: Fransisco (speaker), Bernado

#35: “’tis an unweeded garden/which grows to seed things rank and gross in nature”

• Act 1, Scene 2
• Techniques: Biblical reference (to Eden), metaphor, free verse
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker)

#36: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”

• Act 1, Scene 4
• Techniques: Metaphor
• Characters: Marcellus (speaker)

#37: “But two months dead!…So excellent a king; that was, to this, Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother”

• Act 1, Scene 2
• Techniques: Hyperbole, mythological allusion
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker)

#38: “You were sent for – and/ there is a kind of confession in your looks which your modesties/ have not craft enough to colour. I know the good king and queen have sent for you.”

• Act 2, Scene 2
• Techniques: Free verse, consonance
• Characters: Hamlet (Speaker), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

#39: “O, villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!”

• Act 1, Scene 5
• Techniques: Diacope
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker)

#40: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below/Words without thoughts never to heaven go”

• Act 3, Scene 3
• Techniques: Rhyme, iambic pentameter
• Characters: King Claudius (speaker)

#41: “Here is your husband; like a mildew’d ear, / Blasting his wholesome brother.”

• Act 3, Scene 4
• Techniques: Simile, contrast
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), King Claudius, King Hamlet, Gertrude

#42: “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince/And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

• Act 5, Scene 2
• Techniques: Metaphor, biblical reference
• Characters: Horatio (speaker), Hamlet

Gender Imbalance

#43: “Frailty, thy name is woman!”

• Act 1, Scene 2
• Techniques: Dramatic irony, exclamation
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Queen Gertrude

#44: “Affection? Pooh! /You speak like a green girl,”

• Act 1, Scene 3
• Techniques: Symbolism of green
• Characters: Polonius (speaker), Ophelia

#45: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba/That he should weep for her?”

• Act 2, Scene 2
• Techniques: Dramatic contrast, mythological reference
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Queen Gertrude
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Ophelia

#46: “I’ll loose my daughter to him”

• Act 2, Scene 2
• Techniques: Objectification
• Characters: Polonius (speaker), Ophelia

#47: “Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?”

• 3,现场1
• Techniques: Innuendo, rhetorical question, double entendre

#48: “Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed / Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty,”

• Act 3, Scene 4
• Techniques: Metaphor, contrast
• Characters: Hamlet (speaker), Queen Gertrude, King Claudius

#49: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies. that’s for thoughts.”

• Act 4, Scene 5
• Techniques: Symbolism, tricolon
• Characters: Ophelia (speaker), King Claudius

#50: “for shame! Young men will do’t…they are to blame”

• Act 4, Scene 5
• Techniques: Rhyme
• Characters: Ophelia (speaker)