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Who really said it

To thine own self be true

Not the Bible — actually William Shakespeare William Shakespeare c. 1564–1616 · English playwright, poet and actor
Disputed Free to reuse

The line is Polonius’s, spoken to his son Laertes in Act 1, Scene 3 of Hamlet — a play written around 1599–1601 and first printed in quarto in 1603. The full sentence runs “This above all: to thine own self be true; / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” It is not Scripture: a King James Version search for “thine own self” returns only Exodus 32:13 and Philemon 1:19, and neither contains the maxim.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“To thine own self be true” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3, spoken by Polonius (play written c. 1599–1601; first printed 1603). It is not a Bible verse. · Verbatim: “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

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In context

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Provenance

The source text

Work
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Passage
Act 1, Scene 3 — Polonius’s farewell precepts to Laertes
Written
c. 1599–1601; first printed in quarto 1603, second quarto 1604/5, First Folio 1623
Speaker
Polonius, a character — not Shakespeare in his own voice

Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
For loan oft loses both itself and friend;
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee. Polonius to Laertes

Transcribed from Project Gutenberg’s Hamlet ↗ (ebook no. 1524). Editions differ on the spelling of the key phrase — Gutenberg prints “to thine own self”, the MIT text “to thine ownself”.

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3 at Project Gutenberg

How we checked

  • The line sits at the close of Polonius’s speech of precepts to Laertes in Project Gutenberg’s text of Hamlet ↗, four lines after “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”.
  • Wikiquote’s Hamlet article ↗ assigns the quotation to Polonius at Act I, scene iii, with the two following lines attached.
  • A King James Version search for “thine own self” at Bible Gateway ↗ returns only Exodus 32:13 and Philemon 1:19 — the phrase in its proverbial form is in no verse.
  • Wikipedia’s Hamlet article ↗ dates composition to 1599–1601 and records the first quarto (Ling and Trundell, 1603), the second quarto (Ling, 1604, some copies 1605) and the First Folio (1623).
Public domain

Hamlet was written around 1599–1601 and printed in quarto in 1603 and 1604/5 — centuries before the 1931 United States copyright cutoff — so Shakespeare’s text is in the public domain. No translation is involved: this is the author’s own English. The text quoted here is Project Gutenberg’s free public-domain edition ↗.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Where the credit goes wrong

This is one of the most persistently “biblical” sentences in English that has never appeared in a Bible. Two separate things get misplaced: the book it came from, and the mouth it came out of.

Scripture — usually cited as King James, sometimes as Proverbs In no verse

A King James Version search for the string “thine own self” returns just two verses ↗: Exodus 32:13 (“thou swarest by thine own self”) and Philemon 1:19 (“thou owest unto me even thine own self besides”). Neither is the maxim, and neither is about self-fidelity. GotQuestions.org states it plainly ↗: the phrase “is not in the Bible.”

William Shakespeare, offering personal moral advice A character speaks it

Shakespeare wrote the line, but he gave it to Polonius — the courtier who spies on his own son, hides behind a tapestry, and is stabbed there. Wikipedia records that he is “described as a windbag by some and a rambler of wisdom by others” ↗. Quoting the sentence as Shakespeare’s own counsel skips over who is talking.

“To thine ownself be true” Editions differ

Modern editions do not agree on whether the pronoun and noun are one word or two. Project Gutenberg’s text ↗ prints “to thine own self be true”, while the MIT text of the same scene ↗ prints “to thine ownself be true”. Both are the same line; neither spelling is a different quotation.

It is Polonius, in Act 1, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet ↗ — a play written around 1599–1601 — and it is in no Bible at all.

Context

Why a stage windbag became a devotional motto

Polonius is not a prophet. He is Claudius’s chief counsellor and the play’s most reliable bore — Wikipedia notes he has been “described as a windbag by some and a rambler of wisdom by others” ↗. The advice to Laertes is a rapid-fire string of copybook maxims delivered by a father who spends the rest of the play spying on both of his children, and who dies stabbed through a curtain while eavesdropping. Whether the audience is meant to nod along or wince is one of the play’s oldest arguments.

What is not in dispute is the wording. The precept comes at the end of the speech, immediately after “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” — and the two lines have had very different afterlives. One is remembered as Shakespeare. The other, stripped of its speaker and its irony, drifted far enough from the play to be mistaken for a commandment.

Polonius says it, Shakespeare wrote it, and no Bible contains it.

Why it sounds like Scripture

Three things push the line toward the pulpit. The archaic second person — thine, thou canst — is the register English speakers know almost exclusively from the King James Bible, published within a decade of Hamlet. The sentence is built as a moral imperative with a promised consequence (“be true … and it must follow”), the grammatical shape of a proverb or a commandment. And it is quoted almost universally on its own, detached from the character who says it and the scene he says it in.

The confusion is common enough to be answered directly by Bible-reference sites. GotQuestions.org ↗ opens its entry with the flat statement that the phrase is not in the Bible, then sends readers to Hamlet. OpenBible.info ↗ maintains a topical page headed “6 Bible Verses about To Thine Own Self Be True” — and every verse it lists (1 Timothy 6:10, Romans 8:28, Proverbs 3:5 among them) is a thematic neighbour, not a match. The page exists because people go looking; the contents show what they find.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Truth Wisdom

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Hamlet, full textgutenberg.org

Project Gutenberg’s public-domain Hamlet (ebook no. 1524). Polonius’s speech in Act 1, Scene 3 prints the line as “This above all: to thine own self be true”.
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3shakespeare.mit.edu

The MIT complete-works text of the scene, useful for reading the precepts speech whole. Its editors print the compound form “to thine ownself be true”.
Wikiquote: Hamleten.wikiquote.org

Places the quotation at Act I, scene iii and assigns it to Polonius, with the two following lines.
KJV search: “to thine own self”biblegateway.com

A full King James Version search. It returns exactly two verses — Exodus 32:13 and Philemon 1:19 — and neither is the maxim.
“To thine own self be true” is not in the Biblegotquestions.org

A Bible-reference site addressing the misconception head-on and naming Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3 as the real source.
Hamlet: composition and early textsen.wikipedia.org

Dates the play to 1599–1601 and records the first quarto (1603), second quarto (1604/5) and First Folio (1623) printings.

The real author

Who actually wrote it

William Shakespeare

c. 1564–1616 · English playwright, poet and actor

Shakespeare was baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564 and died on 23 April 1616; Wikipedia’s opening line calls him simply “an English playwright, poet and actor.” Hamlet, written around 1599–1601, is the most-quoted play in the language, and Polonius’s farewell speech to Laertes is a dense little anthology of proverbs — “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “to thine own self be true” arrive within four lines of each other. Both have long since escaped the play and now circulate as free-floating folk wisdom, which is exactly how one of them ended up filed under Scripture.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this page

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, scene 3 (written c. 1599–1601; first printed in quarto, London, 1603). Text quoted from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Project Gutenberg ebook no. 1524.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘To thine own self be true’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/to-thine-own-self-be-true/

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