Source: Poetry Lovers Facebook page

Hamlet:  Then is doomsday near! But your news is not true. Let me question more in particular. What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison hither?

Rosencrantz:  Prison, my lord?

Hamlet:  Denmark’s a prison.

Rosencrantz:  Then is the world one.

Hamlet:  A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.

Rosencrantz:  We think not so, my lord.

Hamlet:  Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

Rosencrantz:  Why, then your ambition makes it one. ‘Tis too narrow for your mind.

Hamlet: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Rosencrantz:  Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

Hamlet:  A dream itself is but a shadow.

Rosencrantz:  Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.

Hamlet:  Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretch’d heroes the beggars’ shadows.

This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

— Polonius, in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3

For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favor,
Hold it a fashion, and a toy in blood;
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent- sweet, not lasting;
The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
No more.

— Laertes, in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3

Photo credit: Gonzalo Molina [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D