“The artist’s work is to show us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men.”
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
“Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him.”
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
“The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they shew us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be.”
— William Hazlitt, The Round Table (1817)
“Seek your examples in life, the great Shtchepkin told us.”
— Konstantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art (1924)
“Faith has great meaning for the actor. Physical truth, and faith in that truth, call out inner spiritual truth and faith, and these free emotion, which comes from its secret hiding places and begins to enter into all that takes place on the stage.”
— Konstantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art (1924)
“The stage not only refines the manners, but it is the best teacher of morals, for it is the truest and most intelligible picture of life.”
— William Hazlitt, The Round Table (1817)
“In my search for characterization I looked for it in real life, and when I found it, tried to carry it on to the stage.”
— Konstantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art (1924)
“Be not too tame neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.”
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“Must a careful and deliberate opinion always deny a great man genius? If so, no careful and deliberate opinions from me!”
— Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (1908)
“Players are ‘the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time’; the motley representatives of human nature. They are the only honest hypocrites.”
— William Hazlitt, The Round Table (1817)
“They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself.”
— William Hazlitt, The Round Table (1817)
The Salon library
This is today’s sample of twelve. The whole collection is in the Salon.
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truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions.
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