An old man is twice a child.
William Shakespeare
- Author
- William Shakespeare
- Year
- 1602
- Genre
- tragedy
Facts: Wikidata (CC0), as of 2026-07-09
Hamlet is the most quoted work of English literature after the Bible, and much of it is quoted wrong: 'Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio' -- not 'I knew him well'. 'To be, or not to be' opens a suicide meditation, not a pep talk, and 'get thee to a nunnery' was an insult with a double edge in Elizabethan slang. Roughly 600 words in the play are Shakespeare's own coinages, quoted daily by people who have never read it.
Frailty, thy name is woman!
William Shakespeare
I hold ambition of so light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
William Shakespeare
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
William Shakespeare
O, from this time forth My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!
William Shakespeare
For us, and for our tragedy, Here stooping to your clemency, We beg your hearing patiently.
William Shakespeare
The Play's The Thing
William Shakespeare
The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
William Shakespeare
This above all: to thine own self be true
William Shakespeare
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 And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this reagard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.
William Shakespeare
To 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?
William Shakespeare
To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day, All in the morning betime.
William Shakespeare
To sleep, perchance to dream.
William Shakespeare
Vanity! Thy name is woman!
William Shakespeare