— Hamlet (1601), Act 1, Scene 3
About this quote
हिन्दी में
सबसे बढ़कर यह: अपने आप के प्रति सच्चे रहो।
What it means
Read as a complete thought it sounds like a command to be yourself, but it is the first half of a piece of reasoning: constancy to yourself is recommended because of what it then makes impossible in your dealings with other people. The argument is prudential — self-consistency as the mechanism that keeps you from being caught out, not as a value standing on its own.
The verb has also drifted. True in this English means steady, constant, reliable — the sense in a true friend, or a wheel running true — not authentic, which is the modern meaning read back into it. The two pull opposite ways: one asks you to hold to what you committed to when you no longer feel like it, the other licenses you to drop it precisely because you no longer feel like it.
What it teaches you
Next time this line comes to hand to settle something — leaving a job, ending an obligation, saying the blunt thing — check which sense you are using. If it is constancy, the test is whether you are keeping faith with a commitment you actually made. If it is authenticity, the test is only that the impulse is genuinely yours, which is a much lower bar and one that nearly every impulse clears.
अर्थ और सीख
यह वाक्य पूरी बात नहीं, एक तर्क का पहला हिस्सा है — अपने प्रति स्थिर रहने की सलाह इसलिए दी जा रही है कि फिर आप दूसरों के साथ भी खरे रह सकें। पुरानी अंग्रेज़ी में ‘true’ का अर्थ था स्थिर और भरोसेमंद, जैसे ‘सच्चा मित्र’ — न कि आज वाला ‘जो मन में है वही करो’। सीख यह है कि जब आप इस पंक्ति के सहारे कोई फ़ैसला सही ठहराएँ, तो देखें कि आप कोई वचन निभा रहे हैं या बस अपने मन की कर रहे हैं।
Where it comes from
Polonius, loading his son with advice at the quayside. Quoted on its own it has become a general licence for authenticity.
In the play it is the end of a long, self-satisfied speech by a man Shakespeare draws as a tedious schemer, and it is addressed to a son he will shortly have spied on. The irony is not incidental; it is the joke.
