"Shakespeare said, nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so"
About this Quote
A movie-star paraphrase of Hamlet is doing double duty here: it borrows Shakespeare’s cultural authority while translating his bleak Danish mood into a usable, modern tool. Dyan Cannon isn’t delivering a literature lecture; she’s offering a survivable philosophy. Framed as “Shakespeare said,” the line is a shortcut to legitimacy, a way for a public figure to sound less like she’s self-soothing and more like she’s invoking an old, heavyweight truth.
The intent is practical: reclaim agency in situations where an actress, a woman, or a celebrity might be treated as a headline instead of a person. If “thinking makes it so,” then the mind becomes a lever. You can’t always control the narrative machine, the aging curve, the divorce, the box-office churn, but you can control the meaning you assign to what happens. That’s not naive optimism; it’s a strategy for staying intact under scrutiny.
The subtext is also defensive. It gently sidesteps moral absolutism: if good and bad are partly mental constructions, then judgment (including public judgment) loses some of its sting. There’s a therapeutic, self-authoring vibe that fits late-20th-century celebrity culture, where private pain gets monetized and resilience becomes a brand.
Contextually, it’s a distilled version of “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, Act II). In Hamlet, it lands as existential claustrophobia; in Cannon’s mouth, it becomes an empowerment mantra. Same sentence, different weather.
The intent is practical: reclaim agency in situations where an actress, a woman, or a celebrity might be treated as a headline instead of a person. If “thinking makes it so,” then the mind becomes a lever. You can’t always control the narrative machine, the aging curve, the divorce, the box-office churn, but you can control the meaning you assign to what happens. That’s not naive optimism; it’s a strategy for staying intact under scrutiny.
The subtext is also defensive. It gently sidesteps moral absolutism: if good and bad are partly mental constructions, then judgment (including public judgment) loses some of its sting. There’s a therapeutic, self-authoring vibe that fits late-20th-century celebrity culture, where private pain gets monetized and resilience becomes a brand.
Contextually, it’s a distilled version of “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, Act II). In Hamlet, it lands as existential claustrophobia; in Cannon’s mouth, it becomes an empowerment mantra. Same sentence, different weather.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Hamlet (c.1600), Act II, Scene II — line spoken by Hamlet: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." |
More Quotes by Dyan
Add to List
