Shakespeare quotes

Macbeth:


To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28

After hearing that his wife has died, Macbeth takes stock of his own
indifference to the event. Death—our return to dust—seems to him merely
the last act of a very bad play, an idiot's tale full of bombast and
melodrama ("sound and fury"), but without meaning ("signifying
nothing"). Murdering King Duncan and seizing his throne in retrospect
seem like scenes of a script Macbeth was never suited to play. The idea
that "all the world's a stage" is occasionally very depressing to
Shakespeare's heroes.

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow"—along with the other
phrases culled from this lode of Bardisms—conveys the mechanical beat
of time as it carries this poor player-king from scene to scene. "The
last syllable of recorded time"—what Macbeth earlier called "the crack
of doom" [see p. 25]—casts time as a sequence of words, as in a
script; history becomes a dramatic record. If life is like a bad play,
it is thus an illusion, a mere shadow cast by a "brief candle." The
candle is perhaps the soul, and the prospects for Macbeth's are grim.