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1 " Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. "
― William Shakespeare , Macbeth
2 " Out, out brief candle, life is but a walking shadow...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. "
3 " Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin. For if this was not so, do the ideas of progress, of history, have any meaning? Is there not a movement, however tortuous, from ignorance to knowledge, from mythical thought and childish fantasies to perception of reality face to face, to knowledge of true goals, true values as well as truths of fact? Can history be a mere purposeless succession of events, caused by a mixture of material factors and the play of random selection, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing? This was unthinkable. The day would dawn when men and women would take their lives in their own hands and not be self-seeking beings or the playthings of blind forces that they did not understand. It was, at the very least, not impossible to conceive that such an earthly paradise could be; and if conceivable we could, at any rate, try to march towards it. That has been at the centre of ethical thought from the Greeks to the Christian visionaries of the Middle Ages, from the Renaissance to progressive thought in the last century; and indeed, is believed by many to this day. "
― Isaiah Berlin , The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
4 " ...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India.... "
― New York Times
5 " Polyamory is differentiable from some other forms of nonmonogamy (including adultery) in that it is future-oriented. Poly relationships are not located solely in the moment, but have intentions (though perhaps tacit and vaguely defined) of at least adding to a base of experience possibly so far as signifying a life-long and emotionally attached commitment. "
― , Polyamory: Roadmaps for the Clueless and Hopeful: An Introduction on Polyamory
6 " Khatun (queen) is one of the most authoritative and magnificent words in the Mongolian language. It conveys regality, stateliness, and great strength. If something resists breaking no matter how much pressure is applied, it is described as khatun. The word can form part of a boy’s or girl’s names, signifying power and firmness combined with beauty and grace. Because of the admitted qualities of khatun, men have often borne names such as Khatun Temur, literally ‘Queen Iron’, and Khatun Baatar, 'Queen Hero’. "
― Jack Weatherford
7 " Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn't work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasn't that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. (" Novelty" ) "
8 " What is Life?(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)(3) Mrs Woolf: ‘Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’(4) Series of actual and hypothetical behavioural data which differ in certain assignable ways from data defining dead or inanimate entities.(5) That which the Lord infused into Adam. See Genesis 1. 4 [sc. 2. 7].Which?Mental Cramp. "
― Isaiah Berlin
9 " At last, somebody in line steps forward. “I can commit,” he says. He’s a tall, lean young man with a rifle slung over his back.“What’s your name?” Chris asks. “Andrew,” he replies. “And I’m in.”Chris nods. A few other guys step forward and, after a few moments, the entire crowd of ex-POWs takes one step, signifying their decision. My chest swells with pride – pride for Chris’s leadership, pride for the people willing to give their lives to take down Omega. It’s a rush. "
― Summer Lane , State of Rebellion (Collapse, #3)
10 " The authors disclose that in less than a century the word " tension" grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, " The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another. "
11 " The flowers must have been the latest generation of perennials, whose ancestors were first planted by a woman who lived in the ruins when the ruins were a raw, unpainted house inhabited by herself and a smoky, serious husband and perhaps a pair or silent, serious daughters, and the flowers were an act of resistance against the raw, bare lot with its raw house sticking up from the raw earth like an act of sheer, inevitable, necessary madness because human beings have to live somewhere and in something and here is just as outrageous as there because in either place (in any place) it seems like an interruption, an intrusion on something that, no matter how many times she read in her Bible, Let them have dominion, seemed marred, dispelled, vanquished once people arrived with their catastrophic voices and saws and plows and began to sing and hammer and carve and erect. So the flowers were maybe a balm or, if not a balm, some sort of gesture signifying the balm she would apply were it in her power to offer redress. "
― Paul Harding
12 " Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. "
― Kate Atkinson , Started Early, Took My Dog (Jackson Brodie, #4)
13 " As I was fixing in the bathroom, I thought about how I used to tell my ex Anne that there was “no reality.” Light merely entered the eye and was translated into electrical signals which were translated into chemical signals translated into gestalts and translated into electrical signals again and so on. It was all a dream of a dream of a dream signifying a source which could be reality of which we experienced only distant modulated echoes of ripples.This used to really annoy her because she suspected it had something to do with my failure to get a job. "
14 " Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.(from " Essay on the Theory of Motion" ) "
15 " ...and it's that time of the day when the fatigue sets in. No, not the physical type of fatigue that goes with a stretching of limbs or a session in my sauna ~which in fact is sparkling signifying it's existence for sheer aesthetics rather that practical use!It was that mental fatigue , when my soul was exhausted and weary; that I needed a shot of Gatorade;just to calm my nerves,stopping me from hallucinationsand let me fall asleep! "
16 " ...and it's that time of the day when the fatigue sets in. No, not the physical type of fatigue that goes with a stretching of limbs or a session in my sauna;which in fact is sparkling signifying it's existence for sheer aesthetics rather that practical use!It was that mental fatigue , when my soul was exhausted and weary; that I needed a shot of Gatorade;just to calm my nerves,stopping me from hallucinationsand let me fall asleep! "
17 " Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing "
18 " True eloquence is irresistible. It charms by its images of beauty, it enforces an argument by its vehement simplicity. Orators whose speeches are " full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," only prevail where truth is not understood, for knowledge and simplicity are the foundation of all true eloquence. Eloquence abounds in beautiful and natural images, sublime but simple conceptions, in passionate but plain words. Burning words appeal to the emotions as well as to the intellect; they stir the soul and touch the heart. "
19 " Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too--a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New Jersey--a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be " out of reach," not a concrete thing signifying " here you are." Even when we are established here, New York still seems a place we aspire to. Its life is one thing--streets and hot dogs and brusqueness--and its symbols, the lights across the way, the beckoning skyline, are another. We go on being inspired even when we're most exasperated. "
20 " what does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside,' 'fragments of music and poetry,' in short, something like an 'uprooting in one's origins (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, or being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces. "
― Michel de Certeau , The Practice of Everyday Life