shakespeare

The passage discusses the dilemma of whether it is better to live and suffer through life's challenges or to end one's life and escape the pain. It ponders the uncertainty of what lies beyond death and suggests that the fear of the unknown keeps people enduring hardships. It also suggests that overthinking and contemplation can hinder one's ability to take action. To be or not to be? That is the question. Whether it's nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them, to die, to sleep, no more, and by sleep to say we end the heartache and a thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, to consummation devoutly to be wished, to die, to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream. There's the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? Who would fartles bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life without the dread of something after death? The undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscious doth make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with disregard their current ternary, and lose the name of action.