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

Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.

The world's a stage on which all parts are played.

If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?

To quote a Shakespearean cliché, repeated to death because it is so stubbornly true: “All the world’s a stage.” Work is theater. The place where life unfolds to our tragic or comic satisfaction.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville.

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.

the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.

I think taking the stage is one of the most unnatural things anyone can do. In a way, just walking on stage actually creates an altered state–it's not right, no one's meant to do that, unless you're a priest or a magician, or something like that. To put somebody who's very incapable in many ways in to that position creates a combustion reaction inside me. I know that, and I take the stage knowing that.

There are now many invisible people on stage.

All the world's not a stage.