theatrical metaphor Quotes

Play your part in life, but never forget it is only a role.

The commonplace expression that life is nothing but a play is verified above all in this: the world speaks absolutely consistently in one way and acts absolutely consistently in another.

Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.

I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

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.

I beg you to believe that life is not a process, it's a drama

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.

Our whole life is like a play.

Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, comedy, farce, or tragedy, by a dramatis personae, the 'self', and so it will be until the curtain drops.

For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

I'm like an old vaudeville act. They'll have to pull me off the stage with a hook.

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

What is our life? A play of passion. Our mirth the music of division. Our mother's wombs the tyring houses be, Where we are drest for this short Comedy.

If Shakespeare can compare all of life to a stage, maybe it's not odd to believe that part of the play can take place on a basketball court.

...It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.

The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

My mother said I should have a 'change of scenery.' The word scenery made be think of a play. And as we were driving around, it made sense that way. Because no matter how much the scenery changed, we were still on the same stage.

emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.

We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.

My life is like a music-hall,Where, in the impotence of rage,Chained by enchantment to my stall,I see myself upon the stageDance to amuse a music-hall.