Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosopher, Writer
"Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal."
Rehearsal quotes
Rehearsal
162 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Drake
Rapper, singer, songwriter
"Life ain't no rehearsal, the cameras always rolling."
Milan Kundera
Writer
"And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?"
Damian Lewis
Actor
"For me the rehearsal period is the part I most enjoy. It's the creating of the story."
Daniel Day-Lewis
Actor
"I don’t like to rehearse. And I couldn’t understand how you could go through eight weeks of rehearsal, without exhausting every possibility. To the point where, you know, you would just lie gasping on the floor!"
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside rehearsal — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Rehearsal quotes (page 1 of 9)
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"Toward the later days of Sabbath, instead of going in and knocking out what songs we did in rehearsal, we would polish them to death."
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"This is not a dress rehearsal; this is your life."
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"Artie travels all the time. The rehearsals were just miserable. Artie and I fought all the time. He didn't want to do the show with my band; he just wanted me on acoustic guitar."
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"We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold."
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"If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room, you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything."
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"I just want to leave you with this thought, that it's just been sort of a dress rehearsal, and we're just getting started. So if any of you start resting on your laurels, I mean just forget it, because...we are just getting started."
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"I love the rehearsal process in the theatre, and the visceral sense of contact and communication with a live audience."
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"Every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turned and well placed, that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music. This is an advantage itinerant preachers have over those who are stationary, as the latter can not well improve their delivery of a sermon by so many rehearsals."
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"Studios are passe for me. I'd rather play in a garage, in a truck, or a rehearsal hall, a club, or a basement."
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"I don't really think about dance except just before rehearsals start. I put it off. I don't live my life thinking about dance"
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"I find it rather tedious working with some actors who have to go into a corner and bounce up and down, shake their hands and arms, saying to the director, "Just a second - I'll be ready in a few minutes, " while all the other actors are waiting around to get in. Then they say, "OK! I'm ready now." And then they come on and do it exactly the same way they've done it in rehearsal."
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"I worked with Sidney Lumet years ago, and we had a long rehearsal process, and he would tape out the entire set on the stage, so I stole that from him."
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"I like to do everything you can possibly do before you go into rehearsal, because once we are in rehearsal or on the stage there will be a problem I didn’t anticipate. It’s really good to think we got it all nailed - of course you’ve never got it all nailed."
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"The rehearsal period is so far away from the time when the scene will actually be shot that very little is remembered."
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"For writers that rehearsal period is death. It is the most destructive thing of all to a script."
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"The process of rehearsal means you learn so much and really get the chance to develop your work on a character."
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"If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room; you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything. I've written lots of material, but how do you memorise 90 minutes? That's one hell of a long speech. I've always had problems with that."
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"Stations and airports are rehearsals for separations by death."
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"My '60s plays were as good as most of the other plays I've written ... except I wasn't in a condition to refine them, to help in the rehearsal, or do anything. I was hardly conscious of what was going on except during the hours of the day when I was actually writing ... and that was with the aid of speed."
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"I think there's a percentage [of the audience] that don't realize, that don't know that [standup] is how everything began. We planned it, we work hard, rehearsals to get this. It's more of a ... it's not just coming in there in a T-shirt and holding a microphone."
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