Alone (as he thinks — Claudius and Polonius are spying), Hamlet asks whether it is nobler to suffer the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or to end them. Death would be sleep — but in that sleep, “what dreams may come”? The fear of “the undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” makes us bear the ills we have rather than fly to others we know not of.
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.
The philosophy: it is the Epicurean question (is death sleep?) answered with Christian dread (the dreams after death), and it ends on the problem of the whole play — thought kills action. “Conscience” here means consciousness, reflection, as much as moral scruple.
Use it for nihilism, suicide, the limits of courage, overthinking — or as Camus’s question avant la lettre.
Lines to Remember
3 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.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsHamlet
Prince of Denmark — scholar, wit, mourner, avenger who cannot avenge — the most quoted and most interpreted character in literature.
The Dover Cliff
Edgar leads his blind father to a “cliff” that isn’t there, lets him leap, and convinces him he has survived by a miracle — curing his despair with a theatrical trick.
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.
Sisyphus at the Foot of the Mountain
Condemned to roll his rock eternally uphill, Sisyphus pauses as it falls back — and Camus imagines him, in that moment of consciousness, happy.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Macbeth, told that his wife is dead, delivers the bleakest speech in Shakespeare — life is a walking shadow, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
Existentialism
The philosophy of the existing individual — freedom, anxiety, authenticity, the absurd — running from Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky through Nietzsche and Heidegger to Sartre and Camus.