“Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.”
24 June 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge 220
English poet, literary critic and philosopher 1772–1834Related quotes
“There's something rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet says… it's payback time!”
Source: Something Rotten
“All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.”
Lapis Lazuli http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1522/, st. 2
Last Poems (1936-1939)
8 November 1852
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: My privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into existence. I feel myself forced to feign a particular interest in my individual part, while all the time I am living in the confidence of the poet who is playing with all these agents which seem so important, and knows all that they are ignorant of. It is a strange position, and one which becomes painful as soon as grief obliges me to betake myself once more to my own little rôle, binding me closely to it, and warning me that I am going too far in imagining myself, because of my conversations with the poet, dispensed from taking up again my modest part of valet in the piece. Shakespeare must have experienced this feeling often, and Hamlet, I think, must express it somewhere. It is a Doppelgängerei, quite German in character, and which explains the disgust with reality and the repugnance to public life, so common among the thinkers of Germany. There is, as it were, a degradation a gnostic fall, in thus folding one's wings and going back again into the vulgar shell of one's own individuality. Without grief, which is the string of this venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, and the chosen souls would be lost for the race, like balloons which, save for gravitation, would never return from the empyrean.
Source: "Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), p. 70
“I saw Hamlet Pr: of Denmark played: but now the old playe began to disgust this refined age.”
November 26, 1661.
The Diary
“To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.”
Source: Sign of the Unicorn
