Constantin Stanislavski > Quotes

“Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.”
― Constantin Stanislavski, My Life In Art

“In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel”
― Constantin Stanislavski, Creating A Role

“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.”
― Constantin Stanislavski

“If you are looking for something, don't go sit on the seashore and expect it to come and find you; you must search, search, search with all the stubbornness in you!”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, Building A Character

“If you have a rifle, hanging on the wall in the first act, it should fire in the last act”.”
― Stanislavski, Constantin S.

“You can kill the King without a sword, and you can light the fire without a match. What needs to burn is your imagination.”
― Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares

“In the circle of light on the state in the midst of darkness, you have the sensation of being entirely alone... This is called solitude in public... During a performance, before an audience of thousands, you can always enclose yourself in this circle, like a snail in its shell... You can carry it wherever you go.”
― Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares

“The theatre infects the audience with its noble ecstasy.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski

“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.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski

“I was truly happy. But my state was not that of any ordinary satisfaction. It was a joy which stemmed directly from creative, artistic achievement.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, Building A Character

“Everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. Only the dead have no sensations.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares

“There are no small parts, only small actors.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski

“Doubt is the enemy of creativeness.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski

“It is not enough to discover the secret of a play, its thought and feelings—the actor must be able to convert them into living terms.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, Creating A Role

“Never lose yourself on the stage. Always act in your own person, as an artist. The moment you lose yourself on the stage marks the departure from truly living your part and the beginning of exaggerated false acting. Therefore, no matter how much you act, how many parts you take, you should never allow yourself any exception to the rule of using your own feelings. To break that rule is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a palpitating, living, human soul, which is the real source of life for a part”
― Konstantin Stanislavski

“The greatest wisdom is to realize one's lack of it.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski

“All action in the theatre must have an inner justification, be logical, coherent and real.”
― Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares

“On the stage do not run for the sake of running, or suffer for the sake of suffering. Don’t act “in general”, for the sake of action; always act with a purpose.”
― Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares

“Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski

“Today the Director opened his remarks by telling us what we must always do when the author, the director, and the others who are working on a production, leave out things we need to know. We must have, first of all, an unbroken series of supposed circumstances in the midst of which our exercise is played. Secondly we must have a solid line of inner visions bound up with those circumstances, so that they will be illustrated for us. During every moment we are on the stage, during every moment of the development of the action of the play, we must be aware either of the external circumstances which surround us (the whole material setting of the production), or of an inner chain of circumstances which we ourselves have imagined in order to illustrate our parts. Out of these moments will be formed an unbroken series of images, something like a moving picture. As long as we are acting creatively, this film will unroll and be thrown on the screen of our inner vision, making vivid the circumstances among which we are moving. Moreover, these inner images create a corresponding mood, and arouse emotions, while holding us within the limits of the play.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares

“The actor does not live, he plays. He remains cold toward the object of his acting but his art must be perfection.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares

“The verbal text of a play, especially one by a genius, is the manifestation of the clarity, the subtlety, the concrete power to express invisible thoughts and feelings of the author himself. Inside each and every word there is an emotion, a thought, that produced the word and justifies its being there.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, Creating A Role

“If you speak any lines, or do anything, mechanically, without fully realizing who you are, where you came from, why, what you want, where you are going, and what you will do when you get there, you will be acting without imagination. That time, whether it will be short or long, will be unreal, and you will be nothing more than a wound-up machine, an automation.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares

“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.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski

“In every physical action, unless it is purely mechanical, there is concealed some inner action, some feelings. This is how the two levels of life in a part are created, the inner and the outer. They are intertwined. A common purpose brings them together and reinforces the unbreakable bond.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski

“You should first of all assimilate the model. This is complicated. You study it from the point of view of the epoch, the time, the country, condition of life, background, literature, psychology, the soul, way of living, social position, and external appearance; moreover, you study character, such as custom, manner, movements, voice, speech, intonations, All this work on your material will help you permeate it with your own feelings. Without all this you will have no art.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares

“At the bottom of every process of obtaining creative material for our work is emotion. Feeling, however, does not replace an immense amount of work on the part of our intellects. Perhaps you are afraid that the little touches which your mind may add on its own account will spoil your material drawn from life? Never fear that. Often these original additions enhance it greatly if your belief in them is sincere.”
― Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares

“To avoid such mistakes, remember, for all time, that when you begin to study each role you should first gather all the materials that have any bearing on it, and supplement them with more and more imagination, until you have achieved such a similarity to life that it is easy to believe in what you are doing. in the beginning forget about your feelings. When the inner conditions are prepared, and right, feelings will come to the surface of their own accord.”
― Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares

“I hurried down into the orchestra. Rehearsals of other scenes began. But I saw nothing. I was too full of excitement, waiting for my turn. There is a good side to this period of waiting. It drives you into such a state that all you can do is to long for your turn to get through with the thing that you are afraid of.”
― Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares

“It means the story of the play, its facts, events, epoch, time and place of action, conditions of life, the actors’ and regisseur’s interpretation, the mise-en-scene, the production, the sets, the costumes, properties, lighting and sound effects,—all the circumstances that are given to an actor to take into account as he creates his role. ‘If is the starting point, the given circumstances, the development. The one cannot exist without the other, if it is to possess a necessary stimulating quality. However, their functions differ somewhat: if gives the push to dormant imagination, whereas the given circumstances build the basis for if itself. And they both, together and separately, help to create an inner stimulus.”
― Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares