Inspirational Quotes for Theatre


The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
-- Michelangelo

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.
-- Michael O'Brien

Everyone has an opportunity to be great because everyone has an opportunity to serve.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

No great thing is created suddenly.
-- Epictetus, philosopher

Be hard on yourself and life will be easy on you. Be easy on yourself and life will be hard on you.
-- Chuck Bode

All things are difficult before they are easy.
-- John Norley

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit.
-- George Allen, US senator

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
-- Christopher Reeve, Actor

The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.
-- Moliere, Playwright

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
-- Japanese Proverb

Every character is a part of you and a part of the character that you are going to evolve into that you are not yet.
-- Angelina Jolie

Believing ethics to be of great significance in the success of the theater, Stanislavski said that even very talented actors should be sacrificed if they could not contribute to the harmonious atmosphere of the group. Since the art of the theater is collective work, it is essential that everyone in the group work for the benefit of the whole performance and not solely for himself.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
-- Saint Francis of Assisi

Relentlessly pursue perfection knowing we won't catch it, but in the process we'll achieve excellence.
-- Vince Lombardi

He who works with his hands is a labourer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands, his head and his heart is an artist.
-- Saint Francis of Assisi

Until a character becomes a personality, it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience.
-- Walt Disney

In a Democratic society we must live cooperatively and serve the community in which we live, to the best of our ability. For our own success to be real, it must contribute to the success of others.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
-- Helen Keller

I would like to be going all over the kingdom...and acting everywhere. There's nothing in the world equal to seeing the house rise at you, one sea of delightful faces, one hurrah of applause!
-- Charles Dickens

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
-- Albert Einstein

"Theatrical Logic"


In is down, down is front,
out is up, up is back,
off is out, on is in,
and of course -
right is left, and left is right.

A drop shouldn't and a
block and fall does neither.
A prop doesn't and
a cove has no water.

Tripping is O.K.
A running crew rarely gets anywhere.
A purchase line will buy you nothing.
A trap will not catch anything.
A gridiron has nothing to do with football.

A Strike is work
(in fact a lot of work).
And a green room, thank God, usually isn't.
Now that you are fully versed in theatrical terms,
Break a leg...
but not really!


Every performer has moments of self doubt. The great ones, however,overcome every obstacle to reach their full artistic potential. It takes talent, to be sure, but it also takes a personality that simply will not settle for second best. That's what makes us respect the effort and admire the results.
-- Author Unknown

Act well your part; there all the honor lies.
-- Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, Epistle iv, line 193

How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
-- William Shakespeare

Stars are only a resting place for those who have the courage to try!
-- Unknown

Music has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul, and if it has the power to do this, it is clear that the young must be directed to music and must be educated in it.
-- Aristotle, "Politics"

The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose -- and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization.
-- John F. Kennedy

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
-- Aldous Huxley

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
-- George Bernard Shaw

What if imagination and the arts are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
-- Rollo May

What is Success?

What is success?
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayel of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.

by Ralph Waldo Emerson


The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Nineteenth Century (London, May 1885)

A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
-- Thorton Wilder

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
-- Bertolt Brecht

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you--trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English dramatist, poet. Hamlet, in Hamlet, act 3, sc. 2, speaking to the players

We know what we are, But we know not what we may be.
-- William Shakespeare

Nothing excellent was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Speech is the Mirror of Action!
-- Solon

Audiences know what to expect. . . and that is all they are prepared to believe in.
-- Tom Stoppard

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
-- Unknown

Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

The Stories are Centuries old.
They shout of discovered love and lost hope,
of humor and anguish,
of mystery and maidens
and tragic farewells.

Within three plain walls and a curtain
lies a world in which we've never lived.
A world we think we know.

The Performing Arts are beacons of the times.
They reflect the best of us
and the worst of us.
As they tell their tales,
on a stage,
shining in the light."

Anonymous

On a day no different than the one now dawning, Shakespeare sat down and started Hamlet, Leonardo stepped to an easel and made the first strokes of the Mona Lisa, and Beethoven took out a sketch book and began the Ninth Symphony.
-- adapted from Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
-- Unknown

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Give Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
-- Will Rogers

People will forget how fast you did a job -- but they will always remember how well you did it.
-- Howard @. Newton

A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
-- Walter Gagedhot

Success is gettin up one more time than you fall.
-- Unknown

Many of life's failures are men and women who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
-- Unknown

A certain amount of opposition is of great help. Kites rise against, not with the wind.
-- John Neal

I don't know what the key to success is, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone.
-- Bill Cosby

Improvement Don't find fault, find a remedy.
-- Henry Ford

A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.
-- Leo Burnett

When you reach for the stars you might not get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.
-- Leo Burnett

Improvement is achieved when performance is tested.
-- Unknown

Create an atmosphere in which anything is possible.
-- Thomas Kelly

Give us somewhere to stand and we will move the earth.
-- Archimedes

Perhaps, therefore, ideal stage managers not only need to be calm and meticulous professionals who know their craft, but masochists who feel pride in rising above impossible odds.
-- Sir Peter Hall, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre of Great Britain

No person who is enthusiastic about his work has anything to fear from life. All the opportunities in the world are waiting to be grasped by people who are in love with what they're doing.
-— Samuel Goldwyn

To accomplish great things we must not only act,but also dream; not only play, but also believe.
-- Anatole France

We're actors! We're the opposite of people!
-- The Player, Rozencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead

The Theatre is magic, and blessed are those who make that magic.
-- Author Unknown

What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?
-- Al Pacino in "Looking for Richard"

Good theater anywhere is good for theater everywhere.
-- Frank Schneeberger

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
-- Victor Hugo

I don't care if people think I'm an overactor. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.
-- actor Jim Carrey

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.
-- Colin L. Powell

We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.
-- Helen Keller

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
-- Henry Ford

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.
-- Anonymous

Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.
-- Henry Ford

The only way to discover the limits of the possibilities is to go beyond them into the impossible.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

The path to success is to take massive, determined action.
-- Anthony Robbins

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
-- Walt Disney

The sure way to miss success is to miss the opportunity.
-- Victor Charles

It may be that those who do the most, dream the most.
-- Anonymous

Continuous efforts - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.
-- Winston Churchill

The difficulties and struggles of today are but the price we must pay for the accomplishments and victories of tomorrow.
-- William J.H. Boetcker

If you want to conquer fear, don't sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"A Recipe for Failure"


1. Never get involved in anything. Say to yourself often, "Nothing Matters."
2. Keep you brain from getting tired - don't think about anything important too much.
3. Don't care about anyone or anything. Save all your concern for yourself and work on elevating selfishness to an art form.
4. Be a walking disaster. Leave trails of chaos in your wake where ever you go.
5. Have low expectations for yourself and always live down to them.
6. Waste as much time as possible. Spend your time hanging out, sleeping, playing games, complaining about how unfair life is, and making excuses.
7. Ignore other people and pretend you live alone on some remote island out in the Pacific Ocean.
8. Work on developing rude and obnoxious behaviors and appearances.
9. Never assess yourself, question your own values, or analyze your personal lifestyle.
10. Always keep your consciousness altered enough to keep you from fully grasping what is or is not happening to you.
11. Commit as much of your time, energy, and money as you can towards maintaining at least one major addiction to something everyone says is bad for you.

Copyright 1999, Ric Andrews

The will to succeed is important, but what's even more important is the will to prepare.
-- Bobby Knight

Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who will do and dare.
-- Dale Carnegie

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.
-- Tennessee Williams

Be honest and accept the consequences; be creative and accept the consequences . . .. And above all, if you choose the path of the artist, understand that life is a risk.
-- Jesús Urzagasti

The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it's something that theatre can do, but it's rare; it's very rare.
-- John Berger

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
-- William Jennings Bryan

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure - which is: Try to please everybody.
-- Herbert Bayard Swope

The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
-- John Ruskin

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
-- Will Rogers

Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
-- Rudyard Kipling

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
-- Goethe

The two happiest days in a theatre person's life: The day you start on a new show and the day the thing closes.
-- Unknown

We just put a man on the moon. If you miss a cue, no one will die.
-- submitted by Shelli Aderman, SMA

Every noble work is, at first, impossible.
-- Carlyle

Dreams + Hard Work = Miracles

There can be no conquest to the man who dwells in the narrow and small environment of a groveling life, and there can be no vision to the man the horizon of whose vision is limited by the bounds of self. But the great things of the world, the great accomplishments of the world, have been achieved by men who had high ideals and who have received great visions. The path is not easy, the climbing is rugged and hard, but the glory at the end is worthwhile.
-- Matt Henson

There is no shame in having fallen. Nor is there any shame in being born into lowly estate. There in only shame in not struggling to rise. And also shame for not wishing to attain the better. Or not dreaming about it and praying for it.
-- Samuel Amalu

Every successful man I have heard of has done the best he could with conditions as he found them, and not waited until next year for better.
-- Edgar Watson Howe

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by obstacles he has overcome while trying to succeed.
-- Booker T. Washington

People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit. Most men achieve because they are determined to.
-- George Allen

To go into acting is like asking for admission to an insane asylum. Anyone may apply, but only the certifiably insane are admitted.
-- Michael Shurtleff, "Audition"




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