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Hamlet Mortality Quotes

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!

– William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2. In Hamlet’s first soliloquy we learn that, following the death of his father and his mother’s remarriage to his father’s brother, Hamlet believes his life is pointless. He wishes that God had not made suicide a sin. Even before he hears the shocking revelations about his father’s death, Hamlet is clearly deeply troubled. Note the use of a metaphor comparing Hamlet’s flesh to melting ice, indicating how depressed he feels.

I am thy father’s spirit;
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. – List, list, O, list!

– William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5. The Ghost speaking to Hamlet, claiming to be his recently dead father. He says he is destined to walk around the land of the living by night, and spend daylight hours in the holy fire of Purgatory for his unspecified "foul crimes." If he was not forbidden to do so, he would tell Hamlet what it is like in Purgatory, a tale that would make his hair stand on end.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.

– William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2. A melancholic Hamlet is not seeing seeing the world and people as others do. He begins by saying that there so much beauty in a human, a masterpiece with unlimited abilities, angelic in action, godlike in understanding. That’s the appearance. To him in reality humans are just a "quintessence of dust." He feels betrayed a number of people close to him, who are not what they seem to be. He doesn’t trust Claudius, his mother, Polonius, he knows Ophelia is likely being used as a pawn against him, and "friends" Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are spying on him for the King.

To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

– William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1. Hamlet is in a very melancholic state and contemplating suicide. Using sleep as a metaphor for death, he longs for that sleep, but the same time wonders about the fearful uncertainty of what comes after death – "what dreams may come."

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table: that’s the end.

– William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 3. When Claudius asks where Polonius is at supper, Hamlet makes this reply admitting that Polonius is dead, but in a roundabout way. He uses vulgar, graphic imagery of death and decay, saying the corpse of Polonius is now a feast for worms. And he speaks of the democracy of death, with rich and poor, high and low, ending up as dishes at the same meal.

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element.

– William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 7. Gertrude’s poignant report of Ophelia’s drowning to Claudius and Laertes. She reports that she fell into a brook and her clothes became heavy with waer and pulled her under. While drowning, she seemed oblivious to her plight and "chanted snatches of old tunes." This account supports Ophelia’s accidental death as a result of her madness. But later she is denied a full Christian burial by the church on the grounds that she committed suicide. Many suggest that she was driven to drown herself following her rejection by Hamlet and the murder of her father.

Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?…Is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures?

– William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1. When the gravedigger throws up another skull, Hamlet wonders if it belonged to a lawyer. In a flurry of puns he wonders where all his lawyer tricks are now that this gravedigger knocks him on the head with a dirty shovel.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it.

– William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1. In the graveyard Hamlet fondly remembers the court jester Yorick. He tells Horatio how he knew him as a child, a funny fellow who used to carry him on his back. Now, holding up his skull, he is horrified at the way he has decayed and is reduced to this.
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