CONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKI

Our demands are simple, normal, and therefore they are difficult to satisfy. All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws.

Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.

Create your own method. Don't depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.

Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation.

Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it.

The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.

We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.

The greatest wisdom is to realize one's lack of it.

In the given circumstances you must be rooted in the play. Do not depart from the play. Don't cut yourself off from your partner in the scene, or partners.

Young actors, fear your admirers! Learn in time, from your first steps, to hear, understand and love the cruel truth about yourselves. Find out who can tell you that truth and talk of your art only with those who can tell you the truth.

In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel

All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real.

Play well, or play badly, but play truly.

At times of great stress it is especially necessary to achieve a complete freeing of the muscles

It is through you, actors, that the forces which are understood by millions and that tell of everything that is beautiful on earth, find expression. The forces which reveal to people the happiness of living in a widened consciousness and in the joy of creative work for the whole world. You, the actors of a theatre, which is one of the centres of human culture, will never be understood by the people if you are unable to reflect the spiritual needs of your time, the now in which you are living.

Never allow yourself externally to portray anything that you have not inwardly experienced and which is not even interesting to you.

In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.

In life we listen to other people. Listen with varying degrees of concentration and attention, right? Actors must learn to listen in a different way.

In talking about a genius, you would not say that he lies; he sees realities with different eyes from ours.

Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.

I have taken film-work that has been a little more cliché-written, to support myself and my family, and that's a whole kind of other challenge. It's like chopping wood: You've got to take what you can get and bless what withstands you. But in theatre! There's enough great theatre that you can find something interesting!

Fear your admirers! Learn in time to hear, understand, and love the cruel truth about yourselves!

Doubt is the enemy of creativeness.

When you're playing a character who's cruel, look for the places where he's kind. When you're playing a character who is unhappy, look for the places where he has a glint of merriment.

I was born an ordinary actor. I will die an ordinary actor. But I've persisted.