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.

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.

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

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.

Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.
I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.
I have to guess on the spot
just what this play’s all about.
Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.
Words and impulses you can’t take back,
stars you’ll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run — the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.
If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).
You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I’ve done.

Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.

Most of us are confused about what is real.

It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

Christians are not particularly gifted at knowing how we sound to others, especially in parts of the world where our voices are the loudest and most numerous.

You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.