To be, or not to be? That is the question.?

Answer 1

rachel, regardless of the times or the problems you face it is ALWAYS better, "to be" than not!

Answer 2

80% of humanity, the religious folks, don't need to ask the meaning of life, the church tells them....the supernatural explanation. But the rest of us can't swallow religious dogma, because there's no evidence. Nobody can prove that there life after death, that people are tortured or rewarded after life or that there's invisible spirits running around.

I've come to two conclusions recently:

1. Life has no meaning
2. Life has a million meanings.

First, there's a certainty that death and annihilation awaits not only you, but the Earth in general. It's an astonomical certainty that our sun will supernova and leave the earth a burnt crisp, not to mention all the other extinction level events around the corner.

Second, the million things that give us meaning are the pleasurable experiences we can conjure up during the short period we are here on the earth, in the form of the relationships we have with our kids and other people, and the 'housekeeping' types of purposes. What i mean by that are the curing disease, ending hunger, improving literacy, reducing crime, preventing war, helping other kinds of things.

So the bottom line is, we only have a temporary meaning to life, to reduce pain and increase pleasure, other than that everything is lost to oblivion.


To be or not to be? "To be" is temporary and "not to be" is inevitable.....

Answer 3

HAMLET: 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 heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. 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,
Th' 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 th' 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 undiscovered 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 enterprise of great pitch 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 remembered.

Hopefully you weren't asking because you're suicidal. If so, get help (from a live person, not online) immediately!

Answer 4

Well, contrary to most of your answers, I do know the quote & used to know the whole paragraph...wether 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...I would go on, but I would just be misquoting more...gotta brush up on my Shakespeare

Answer 5

Hamlet said at one point, "look, where my abridgement comes." "To, or not to be. That is the question" is an abridgement.

Bernardo, speaking of the ghost of Hamlet's father, said, "so like the king that was and is the question of these wars."

Combining these lines to fill in the abridgement, we discover Hamlet's true dilemma: whether "to be or not to be"..."so like the king THAT was and IS THE QUESTION of these wars."

Hamlet was struggling to regain the sovereignty of his reason from the usurping spirit of his war-mongering father. More generally, he was trying to be true to himself (the self formed from thought and reason and "all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation copied there") rather than following the traditions of his father and his uncle ("whither wilt thou lead me?")

Answer 6

From Shakespeare's Hamlet:

"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? (cont.)"

I'd kind of like to live...

Answer 7

its a speech from the play called Hamlet and i wrote a poem on it too.

Answer 8

it all depends on what do you want to be!

Sometimes I wonder about Shakespeare! Perhaps he had difficulties making up is mind, when he wrote that!

Answer 9

sounds like a statement with a question mark.

Answer 10

It depends on what you are talking about. Hamlet, right? Then to be!