She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, 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.
Faulkner took The Sound and the Fury from it. The speech is Macbeth’s punishment: not hell but meaninglessness.
Lines to Remember
1 quotationsLife’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.
Context & when to use it
On hearing of his wife’s death, near his own end.
The definitive line for nihilism and meaninglessness — the absurd before Camus.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsTo Be, or Not to Be
Hamlet’s soliloquy weighing life against death — the most famous speech in English, and a compressed treatise on suicide, fear and the paralysis of thought.
Meursault
Camus’s “stranger” — a clerk in Algiers who will not say more than he feels, kills a man on a beach, and goes to the guillotine opening himself to “the gentle indifference of the world”.
Meursault and the Chaplain
On the eve of execution, Meursault explodes at the prison chaplain’s certainty — and finds peace in the “gentle indifference of the world”.
Existentialism
The philosophy of the existing individual — freedom, anxiety, authenticity, the absurd — running from Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky through Nietzsche and Heidegger to Sartre and Camus.
A Confession
Tolstoy’s account of his mid-life crisis — at the height of fame he could not answer “why live?” and nearly killed himself, until he found meaning in the faith of simple people.
Fathers and Sons
Turgenev’s novel of the generation gap — the nihilist Bazarov against the old liberal Kirsanovs — which gave Russia the word “nihilist”.