Theatre quotes
975 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside theatre — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping."
"The world was no doubt made, that it might be a theatre of the divine glory."
"The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place."
"Growth as an actor and as a human being are synonymous."
"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."
"Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances."
"The play is not in the words, it’s in you!"
"The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."
"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."
"The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time."
"I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being."
"There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel."
"The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid."
"It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write."
"I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself."
"What I’ve learned along the way is that existence is cosmic theatre, but paradoxically, we should play our roles to the absolute best of our ability while having the wisdom not to take them too seriously."
"Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols."
"For the theatre one needs long arms... an artiste with short arms can never make a fine gesture."
"The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life."
"The musical has always been in jeopardy - until - or was in jeopardy until it was realised that it is probably the safest living theatre art form."
