“Just as iron rusts unless it is used, and water putrifies or, in cold, turns to ice, so our intellect spoils unless it is kept in use.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
“He who busies himself in mean occupations produces, in the very pains he takes about things of little or no use, an evidence against himself of his negligence and indisposition to what is really good.”
— Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Dryden trans., rev. A. H. Clough)
“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)
“Therefore, we should decide what we wish, and abide by the decision.”
— Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius
“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)
“It’s the study of the figure that teaches one to grasp the essential and to simplify.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
“Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“I read and re-read, I copied, I learnt Gluck's scores by heart, I forgot to eat, drink, or sleep, and when at last I managed to hear Iphigenia in Tauris, I swore that, despite father, mother, relations and friends, a musician I would be and nothing else.”
— Hector Berlioz, The Life of Hector Berlioz as Written by Himself in His Letters and Memoirs (trans. Katharine F. Boult, 1903) (1822)
“Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths or methods are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (Essays: Second Series) (1844)
“Imagination, industry, and intelligence — the three I’s — are all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without any doubt, imagination.”
— Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (1908)
“And the best motion picture story for fifty years may turn out to be a reel ten minutes long. Do not let the length of the commercial film tyrannize over your mind, O young art museum photoplay director.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion
The Salon library
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truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions.
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