Quotes from Konstantin Stanislavski

If you are looking for something, don't go sit on the seashore and expect it to come and find you; you must search, search, search with all the stubbornness in you!

The theatre infects the audience with its noble ecstasy.

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.

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.

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

There are no small parts, only small actors.

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.

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

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

The greatest wisdom is to realize one's lack of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You should first of all assimilate the model. This is complicated. You study it from the point of view of the epoch, the time, the country, condition of life, background, literature, psychology, the soul, way of living, social position, and external appearance; moreover, you study character, such as custom, manner, movements, voice, speech, intonations, All this work on your material will help you permeate it with your own feelings. Without all this you will have no art.

Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.

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

If the man who plays the [...] has talent, he will prove to you by his acting that he is unconscious of any guilt.

A fin de expresar una más delicada y completa vida subconsciente, es necesario tener control de un aparato físico y vocal excepcionalmente responsable, excelentemente preparado

There is a good side to waiting. It drives you into such a state that all you can do is long for your turn to get through with the thing you are afraid of.

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.

If you have a rifle, hanging on the wall in the first act, it should fire in the last act".