Top 30 Sanford Meisner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”

— Sanford Meisner

Featured in: Performance Quotes, Quotes About Acting

2. “That which hinders your task is your task.”

— Sanford Meisner

3. “Acting is not talking, it’s living off the other fellow!!!”

— Sanford Meisner

Featured in: Quotes About Acting

4. “Act before you think – your instincts are more honest than your thoughts.”

— Sanford Meisner

5. “Your acting will not be good until it is only yours. That’s true of music, acting, anything creative. You work until finally nobody is acting like you.”

— Sanford Meisner

6. “The foundation of acting is the reality of doing.”

— Sanford Meisner

Featured in: Quotes About Acting

7. “Listen with your gut, not your head.”

— Sanford Meisner

8. “An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.”

— Sanford Meisner

9. “WHY is the most important word in an actor’s vocabulary.”

— Sanford Meisner

10. “If you want to reach every person in the audience, it’s not about being bigger, it’s about going deeper.”

— Sanford Meisner

11. “Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.”

— Sanford Meisner

12. “Being an actor is a religious calling because you’ve been given the ability, the gift to inspire humanity. Think about that on the way to your soap opera audition.”

— Sanford Meisner

13. “Every little moment has a meaning all its own.”

— Sanford Meisner

14. “The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting.”

— Sanford Meisner

15. “Transfer the point of concentration to some object outside of yourself – another person, a puzzle, a broken plate that you are gluing.”

— Sanford Meisner

16. “Don’t be an actor. Be a human being who works off what exists under imaginary circumstances.”

— Sanford Meisner

17. “Find in yourself those human things which are universal.”

— Sanford Meisner

18. “Technique is something that you use if you need it. Otherwise, to hell with it.”

— Sanford Meisner

19. “You don’t pick up cues, you pick up impulses.”

— Sanford Meisner

20. “The text is your greatest enemy.”

— Sanford Meisner

21. “You can’t learn to act unless you’re criticized. If you tie that criticism to your childhood insecurities you’ll have a terrible time. Instead, you must take criticism objectively, pertaining it only to the work being done.”

— Sanford Meisner

22. “With a developed imagination there’s no place you can’t go.”

— Sanford Meisner

23. “You know it’s all right to be wrong, but it’s not all right not to try.”

— Sanford Meisner

24. “The greatest piece of acting or music or sculpture or what-have-you always has its roots in the truth of human emotion.”

— Sanford Meisner

25. “Courage means willing to risk everything.”

— Sanford Meisner

26. “Acting can be fun. Don’t let it get around.”

— Sanford Meisner

27. “If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don’t have it don’t bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can’t fake emotion.”

— Sanford Meisner

28. “The only way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of what you have to do under the imaginary circumstances. And as you develop you become confident. You come to believe in what you’re doing and trust it because it’s out of you.”

— Sanford Meisner

29. “To be inventive, to have ideas, is an organic part of being talented.”

— Sanford Meisner

30. “Acting in a scene is like paddling a canoe from a pebbly beach on to the river, the writer builds the canoe, and the actor provides the river. The river is the actor’s thoughts and emotions.”

— Sanford Meisner

31. “There’s no such thing as nothing.”

— Sanford Meisner

32. “That’s very different, picking up the impulse instead of picking up the cue.”

— Sanford Meisner

33. “One can use standard principles and textbooks in educating people for law, medicine, architecture, chemistry or almost any other profession – but not for the theater. For, in most professions, every practitioner uses the same tools and techniques, while the actor’s chief instrument is himself. And since no two persons are alike, no universal rule is applicable to any two actors in exactly the same way.”

— Sanford Meisner