“Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: DId you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.”
Source: Hamlet
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William Shakespeare 699
English playwright and poet 1564–1616Related quotes
“Lord Bacon could as easily have created this planet as he could have written Hamlet.”
According to Moncure Conway (Thomas Carlyle (1881) p. 122) Carlyle said this in reply to a Baconian enthusiast who was attempting to convert him; alternatively reported as "the planets", remark in discussion, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Attributed
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.
“The neurotic thinks himself both Hamlet and Claudius, in a world that belongs to Polonius.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis
24 June 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 12 : The Companionship of Women
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)