All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
— Jaques, As You Like It · William Shakespeare
The whole world is a theatre, and every person is just an actor in it.
Jaques compares a life to a play in seven acts, from squalling infant to senile old age. The speech is both witty and melancholy: if we are only players performing assigned roles, how much of any life is truly our own?