Top 50 Konstantin Stanislavski Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

2. “Who am I? What will I be? Why am I here? Where am I going?”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

Featured in: Meaning Quotes, Identity Quotes, Existentialism Quotes

3. “Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

Featured in: Quotes About Acting, Quotes About Actors

4. “Play well, or play badly, but play truly.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

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

— Konstantin Stanislavski

6. “You’ll never see any two good actors approach a role in the same way.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

7. “The person you are is a thousand times more interesting than the best actor you could ever hope to be.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

Featured in: Quotes About Actors

8. “You must be so thoroughly immersed in the given circumstances of the play, then you decide what it is at any given moment what that the actor wants.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

9. “When we are on stage, we are in the here and now.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

10. “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.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

11. “What is important to me is not the truth outside myself, but the truth within myself.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

12. “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.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

13. “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.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

14. “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

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

— Konstantin Stanislavski

16. “Of course, if you have thought up to now that an actor relies merely on inspiration you will have to change your mind. Talent without work is nothing more than raw unfinished material.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

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

— Konstantin Stanislavski

18. “When an actor is completely absorbed by some profoundly moving objective so that he throws his whole being passionately into its execution, he reaches a state we call inspiration.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

19. “In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

20. “The greatest wisdom is to realize one’s lack of it.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

21. “The life of a character should be an unbroken line of events and emotions, but a play only gives us a few moments on that line – we must create the rest to portray a convincing life.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

22. “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

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

— Konstantin Stanislavski

24. “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.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

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

— Konstantin Stanislavski

26. “Doubt is the enemy of creativeness.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

27. “It is only when an actor feels that his inner and outer life on the stage is flowing naturally and normally, in the circumstances that surround him, that the deeper sources of his subconscious gently open, and from them come feelings we cannot always analyse.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

28. “The theatre infects the audience with its noble ecstasy.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

29. “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

30. “The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

31. “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.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

32. “A true priest is aware of the presence of the altar during every moment that he is conducting a service. It is exactly the same way that a true artist should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater. An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

33. “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

34. “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.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

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

— Konstantin Stanislavski

36. “The character has to have some kind of arch. The character has to go through an event, and be changed by the human event.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

37. “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

38. “I was born an ordinary actor. I will die an ordinary actor. But I’ve persisted.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

39. “Don’t go so deep in yourself that you no longer exist for your partner and for the character and for the play.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

40. “Everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. Only the dead have no sensations.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

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

— Konstantin Stanislavski

42. “The direct effect on our mind is achieved by the words, the text, the thought, which arouse consideration. Our will is directly affected by the super-objective, by other objectives, by a through line of action. Our feelings are directly worked upon by tempo-rhythm.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

43. “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.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

44. “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.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

45. “The actor does not live, he plays. He remains cold toward the object of his acting but his art must be perfection.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

46. “Success is transient, evanescent. The real passion lies in the poignant acquisition of knowledge about all the shading and subtleties of the creative secrets.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

47. “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

48. “All art is autobiographical – if it’s not, it’s not going to quicken on-stage, and it’s not going to come alive.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

49. “Gratuitous cruelty borders on the pathological, psychotic and that becomes uninteresting because there is no choice.”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

50. “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