Hamlet is about thirty (according to the gravedigger), a student at Wittenberg — Luther’s university — called home by his father’s death. He is witty, cruel to Ophelia, tender with Horatio, savage with himself (“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”), and he thinks out loud in a way no character had done before.
The great question: why does he delay? Coleridge: too much thought. Goethe: a delicate soul given a task too heavy for it (“an oak tree planted in a costly vase”). Freud: Claudius has done what Hamlet unconsciously wished — killed the father and married the mother. Friedrich Nietzsche: Hamlet has seen the truth and is nauseated by action, which can change nothing in the eternal nature of things.
How to use him in conversation: for indecision, over-thinking, grief, disgust with the world (“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!”), and the fear of death.
Lines to Remember
13 quotationsTo be, or not to be: that is the question: 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?
Context & when to use it
Hamlet, alone (he thinks), weighs whether to endure life’s suffering or end it — and why fear of the afterlife stops us.
Any debate about suicide, nihilism, meaning, or choosing between endurance and action. Philosophy, literature and Shakespeare in one line.
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will.
Context & when to use it
Death as a land no one has come back from to report on.
For fear of death and the unknown; agnosticism about the afterlife.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.
Context & when to use it
Reflection paralyses action. “Conscience” means consciousness as much as moral scruple.
Against overthinking; for analysis paralysis; for the intellectual who never acts.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio — a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
Context & when to use it
Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester who carried him on his back as a child.
Memento mori; mourning someone who brought joy; the vanity of wit and fame.
⚠ Often misquoted as “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.”
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
Context & when to use it
Following the dust of great men to its humblest use.
Against pride, empire and power — every conqueror ends as dirt.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Context & when to use it
To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — Denmark is a prison to Hamlet, though not to them.
For moral relativism, Stoic or Buddhist ideas that suffering lies in judgment, or perspectivism (Nietzsche).
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty… the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Context & when to use it
Renaissance humanism’s hymn to man — undercut in the same breath by melancholy.
For humanism versus nihilism; human greatness and insignificance at once.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Context & when to use it
After seeing the Ghost, to his rationalist university friend.
Against narrow rationalism or scientism; for the limits of any system — Kant’s noumena in one line.
⚠ “Your philosophy” means philosophy in general, not Horatio’s personal philosophy.
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!
Context & when to use it
His first soliloquy — wishing “this too too solid flesh would melt”.
For depression, ennui, Weltschmerz.
There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow… the readiness is all.
Context & when to use it
Before the fatal duel, Hamlet has stopped resisting fate.
For acceptance, amor fati, Stoic calm before what must come.
The rest is silence.
Context & when to use it
Hamlet’s last words.
For endings, death, and what cannot be said (compare Wittgenstein — “whereof one cannot speak”).
The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
Context & when to use it
For art as a mirror that reveals guilt.
Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?
Context & when to use it
For resisting manipulation.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsTo Be, or Not to Be
Hamlet’s soliloquy weighing life against death — the most famous speech in English, and a compressed treatise on suicide, fear and the paralysis of thought.
Alas, Poor Yorick
In the graveyard, Hamlet is handed the skull of the jester who carried him on his back as a child — and sees where all flesh, wit and glory end.
Notes from Underground
A spiteful, hyper-conscious ex-official rants from his “mousehole” against reason, progress and the Crystal Palace — often called the first existentialist novel.
Dasein
Heidegger’s term for the human being — “being-there” — the entity whose own being is an issue for it.
The World as Will and Representation
Schopenhauer’s single great work — the world is my representation; in itself it is Will; and the Will is the source of all suffering.
Mokṣa
Liberation — release from the cycle of rebirth and from all suffering, the highest goal of human life in the Hindu and Jain traditions (and, as nirvāṇa, in Buddhism). Every Indian school defines it differently, and the arguments over what it is, and how it is won, are the backbone of Indian philosophy.