Shakespeare's MacBeth, Act 5, Scene 5

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.

Spoken by MacBeth after learning that his wife has died. 

So few words and yet so many of them have made it into our literature and lexicon: 'all our yesterdays', 'Out, out brief candle', 'sound and fury signifying nothing'. On its face the meaning is apparent, that life is futile, we foolishly go about our days with expectations of tomorrow, as if every yesterday provides an assurance of the day to come, (yesterdays that light the way) seemingly unaware that the path we are on is to death, and it may come at an instant, like a gust blowing out a candle. We are 'walking shadows', idiots who perform, 'strut' and 'fret', as if there is meaning and importance to our lives, when in fact our time is short (an hour) and then we are gone ('heard no more'). 

But for me the magic of this passage is in the clockwork precision of the language, the particular choice of words that merge sound and sense drawing the listener's ear to burrow into our subconsciousness. The sound works on the reader without us being aware of it. For instance the repetition of words that suggest the passage of time; 'tomorrow', 'to day', 'yesterday' - time moving from future to present to past, but always reducing in unit from an undetermined length of 'tomorrows' to a myopic point, an 'hour', and finally in the end vanishing completely to 'nothing'. Even the sound of 'tomorrow' a word pregnant with expectation, open ended and trailing off with soft 'ow' syllables, yet containing within it the empty holes of 'o', signifying the 'nothing' seeds of our fate. Contrast 'tomorrow' to the 'petty pace' of 'day to day', the short hard 'p's and 'd's that imitate the concrete steps that we take to pass our days. Notice that 'tomorrow' 'petty pace' and 'day to day' are all three syllables, left-right-left, every syllabic step marking 'recorded time'. The 'o's of tomorrow, those seeds of emptiness return again in the words 'fools' and 'poor', and three syllables repeat in the phrases 'dusty death' 'brief candle' and 'poor player'. Only in 'walking shadow' do three syllables skip to four, and in 'shadow' the 'ow' sound returns our ear (and minds) to 'tomorrow', reinforcing the tension between the hard consonants of action words and the soft fade into the empty air of 'heard no more'. The 'tale told by an idiot' is a phrase shaped by rapid-fire alliterative 't's, like the p's of 'petty pace', but with the emptiness of 'o' inside them, as if to say life is the merger of purposefulness and nothingness, we 'fret' and 'strut' (the t's of 'petty' and 'idiot' making their appearance) and act as if life has purpose even when it possesses none. But the ultimate irony is that this passage itself embodies so much 'sound and fury' Shakespeare concludes signifies nothing, that the reader can justifiably decide actually signifies something deeply meaningful. And I'm quite certain that was his intention.