"Give thy thoughts no tongue"
About this Quote
"Give thy thoughts no tongue" is the first stroke in a cascade of maxims Polonius offers his son Laertes before he leaves for France. The counsel is simple: do not blurt every impulse, and do not make your inner life public. In the slippery court of Elsinore, words can be traps, and speech is a currency that, spent carelessly, exposes the speaker. Silence, or at least selective speech, becomes a strategy for survival.
Yet the advice is steeped in irony. Polonius himself is windy, meddlesome, and fond of hearing his own voice; he is also a spy who dies behind an arras, destroyed by the very culture of concealment he propagates. Shakespeare lets the line ring with double meaning: restraint can be prudence, but it can also enable duplicity. Elsinore thrives on masks, and withholding thoughts nourishes the divide between seeming and being that powers the tragedy.
The line also situates the play within Renaissance courtesy literature, where self-governance and measured speech marked the gentleman. To rule the tongue is to rule the passions and to respect the unpredictable life of words once released. Words do not just transmit thought; they perform, provoke, and bind. A pause before speaking acknowledges that power.
Placed beside Hamlet, the maxim deepens. Hamlet does not give his thoughts a straightforward tongue; he riddles, feigns madness, stages a play, and speaks daggers while holding back the blade. His caution with speech both protects and cripples him, mirroring the play's wider tension between deliberation and action, candor and calculation.
The counsel still resonates in an age of instant publication. Not every thought deserves an audience, and not every moment requires a statement. Yet absolute reticence can curdle into cowardice or complicity when truth demands a voice. Wisdom lies in the difficult discernment: to govern the tongue without muzzling the conscience, and to weigh the cost of silence against the cost of speech.
Yet the advice is steeped in irony. Polonius himself is windy, meddlesome, and fond of hearing his own voice; he is also a spy who dies behind an arras, destroyed by the very culture of concealment he propagates. Shakespeare lets the line ring with double meaning: restraint can be prudence, but it can also enable duplicity. Elsinore thrives on masks, and withholding thoughts nourishes the divide between seeming and being that powers the tragedy.
The line also situates the play within Renaissance courtesy literature, where self-governance and measured speech marked the gentleman. To rule the tongue is to rule the passions and to respect the unpredictable life of words once released. Words do not just transmit thought; they perform, provoke, and bind. A pause before speaking acknowledges that power.
Placed beside Hamlet, the maxim deepens. Hamlet does not give his thoughts a straightforward tongue; he riddles, feigns madness, stages a play, and speaks daggers while holding back the blade. His caution with speech both protects and cripples him, mirroring the play's wider tension between deliberation and action, candor and calculation.
The counsel still resonates in an age of instant publication. Not every thought deserves an audience, and not every moment requires a statement. Yet absolute reticence can curdle into cowardice or complicity when truth demands a voice. Wisdom lies in the difficult discernment: to govern the tongue without muzzling the conscience, and to weigh the cost of silence against the cost of speech.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
|---|---|
| Source | Hamlet (c.1600–1601), Act 1, Scene 3 — Polonius's admonition to Laertes: "Give thy thoughts no tongue." |
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