Top 50 Stella Adler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.”

— Stella Adler

2. “Growth as an actor and as a human being are synonymous.”

— Stella Adler

3. “You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing.”

— Stella Adler

4. “Acting is in everything but the words.”

— Stella Adler

5. “Your talent is in your choice.”

— Stella Adler

6. “Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”

— Stella Adler

7. “Acting is reacting.”

— Stella Adler

8. “The theatre-acting, creating, interpreting – means total involvement, the totality of heart, mind and spirit.”

— Stella Adler

9. “You act with your soul. That’s why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life.”

— Stella Adler

10. “Emotions aren’t doable. Actions are doable, and if you do them correctly, they prompt the feelings.”

— Stella Adler

11. “You cannot afford to confine your studies to the classroom. The universe and all of history is your classroom.”

— Stella Adler

12. “The only excuse for not coming to a class or a performance is death.”

— Stella Adler

13. “You’ll never really be great unless you aim high.”

— Stella Adler

14. “It’s not important to know who you are. It’s important to know what you do, and then to do it like hercules!”

— Stella Adler

15. “The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind.”

— Stella Adler

16. “The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.”

— Stella Adler

17. “Don’t use your conscious past. Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don’t want you to be stuck with your own life. It’s too little.”

— Stella Adler

18. “Tell yourself that the world is outside, that it’s not to be hidden from you, that you are going to thrust yourself forward and be relaxed in the world. You have chosen a field where you’re going to be hurt to the blood. But to retreat from the pain is death.”

— Stella Adler

19. “One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We’re not scientists. We don’t always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.”

— Stella Adler

20. “You will fail. That’s great. Here’s a secret for you – that’s the only way you can learn. Learning has to cost you something. If you fail but learn something from your failure, you will grow.”

— Stella Adler

21. “The play is not in the words, it’s in you!”

— Stella Adler

22. “Life is boring. The weather is boring. Actors must not be boring.”

— Stella Adler

23. “Happy children should not try to be artists. You have to be born with a broken heart and a sense of loneliness inside. I never had a happy moment as a child myself.”

— Stella Adler

24. “No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.”

— Stella Adler

25. “Life in the theatre isn’t necessarily when you get money from performing. It isn’t when you sign a contract. It isn’t even when you are in a play. It’s when you understand it. If you understand it, you’ll know why you want to act.”

— Stella Adler

26. “You’ll begin to act when you can forget your technique – when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously.”

— Stella Adler

27. “When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.”

— Stella Adler

28. “Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what’s beneath the word.”

— Stella Adler

29. “An addict is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong.”

— Stella Adler

30. “I would live in a communist country providing I was the Queen.”

— Stella Adler

31. “To grow: that is your deepest and truest need when you say, ‘I want to be an actor.’”

— Stella Adler

32. “It’s not enough to have talent. You have to have a talent for your talent.”

— Stella Adler

33. “If you can’t take both sides, it means you can only play yourself.”

— Stella Adler

34. “Be innocent, wise and ninety-five.”

— Stella Adler

35. “In life, as on the stage, it’s not who I am but what I do that’s the measure of my worth and the secret of my success. All the rest is showiness, arrogance and conceit.”

— Stella Adler

36. “Acting can be the healthiest profession in the world, because it allows you to do things you can’t do in real life. It allows you to understand more than just what life provides you.”

— Stella Adler

37. “Actors need a kind of aggression, a kind of inner force. Don’t be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average. Find the killer in you.”

— Stella Adler

38. “The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.”

— Stella Adler

39. “Acting requires a creative and compassionate attitude. It must aim to lift life up to a higher level of meaning and not tear it down or demean it. The actor’s search is a generous quest for that larger meaning. That’s why acting is never to be done passively.”

— Stella Adler

40. “The best author is a dead author, because he’s out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.”

— Stella Adler

41. “You have to understand your best. Your best isn’t Barrymore’s best or Olivier’s best or my best, but your own. Every person has his norm. And in that norm every person is a star. Olivier could stand on his head and still not be you. Only you can be you. What a privilege! Nobody can reach what you can if you do it. So do it. We need your best, your voice, your body. We don’t need for you to imitate anybody, because that would be second best. And second best is no better than your worst.”

— Stella Adler

42. “The ultimate aim of the training is to create an actor who can be responsible for his artistic development and achievement.”

— Stella Adler

43. “By taking elements you observe in life, you can develop qualities in your acting life that you don’t ordinarily call upon in your personal life.”

— Stella Adler

44. “You have to do something. If you do something, you become somebody. Even a daffodil does something, has a profession. It gives off scent, professionally.”

— Stella Adler

45. “The actor must be full of passion. If he’s too cool he’s better off as the manager of a company, not someone who appears on the stage.”

— Stella Adler

46. “You should want to act only because you want to be led to something bigger in life.”

— Stella Adler

47. “The thing that makes you say, “I want to do something” – that is the beginning of talent.”

— Stella Adler

48. “That spark has to be kept alive.”

— Stella Adler

49. “Our heritage as actors goes back thousands of years, and we have to feel as comfortable in the clothes, and the language of Sophocles as we do in our sneakers.”

— Stella Adler

50. “The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays.”

— Stella Adler