Daily Inspiration Quote by William Shakespeare

A warning disguised as manners: shut up, for your own good. "Give thy thoughts no tongue" lands with the force of a stage direction for survival, the kind Shakespeare loved because it reads like simple prudence while exposing a whole anthropology of risk. The line comes from Polonius in Hamlet, doling out fatherly maxims to Laertes. That matters, because Polonius is a professional talker - verbose, self-important, convinced that advice is the same thing as wisdom. So the counsel carries a double charge: it functions as practical guidance in a dangerous court, and as inadvertent self-indictment from a man who cannot follow it.

The intent is social: maintain control of your image by disciplining speech. In Elsinore, words are never neutral; they're evidence, ammunition, a way for power to sniff out disloyalty. The subtext is that interiority is valuable only if it stays private. Say less, reveal less, and you can't be trapped as easily. It's the logic of surveillance before cameras: the safest self is the least legible.

Shakespeare makes it work by compacting a whole moral system into a bodily metaphor. Thoughts become something physical you could accidentally "give" away, as if speech were a leak. And because the line is tucked inside a parade of "be this, do that" imperatives, it also satirizes the fantasy that character can be engineered through rules. Hamlet, famously, is all tongue and thought - and the play's tragedy argues that silence and speech are both compromised currencies in a world built on performance.