28: Sage Advice

After witnessing you having a bad interaction with a difficult consultant, your boss walks over to you and says, “That looked rough.  You know, Shakespear wrote ‘Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.’  That’s my mantra when dealing with consultants like that guy.”  You ponder this sage advice, but only for a moment before you hear an overhead announcement from the MICN, “Cardiac arrest 2 minutes out.”

 

Which character said, “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice”?  To whom was it said and in which play 

This famous passage is full of sage advice.  How does it end?

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Get Side-Kick: Emergency Medicine or Quick Essentials: Emergency Medicine

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ANSWER: Polonius said this to his son Laertes, who was about to depart for France in the play Hamlet.  The rest of his fatherly advice follows below.

Yet here, Laertes! Aboard, aboard for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for.
There … my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion’d thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledg’d comrade.  Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel but, being in,
Bear’t that th’ opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
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!

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“Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.”

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