All these writeups failed to identify this as a famous line from
Shakespeare's
Hamlet. It's part of act III scene I during Hamlet's famous
soliloquy:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis 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 a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to
dream: ay, 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 fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
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
conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. -Soft you now!
The fair
Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my
sins remember'd.
"...what dreams may come..." and many other lines from this monologue alone are common references throughout the art world.