Acting Quotes

• "[The] play of limbs succeeds the play of wit."
  By: Horace Smith and James Smith
  Acting Quotes
• "Where they do agree on the stage, then unanimity is wonderful."
  By: Richard Brinsley Sheridan
  Acting Quotes
• "Notwithstanding all that has advanced so very ingeniously upon plays and players, their profession is, like that of a painter, one of the imitative arts, whose means are pleasure, and whose end is virtue."
  By: William Shenstone
  Acting Quotes
• "Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian, Speak and look back, and pry on every side, Tremble and state at wagging of a straw; Intending deep suspicion, ghastly looks . . ."
  By: William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (Buckingham at III, v)
  Acting Quotes
• "As in a theatre the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next, Thinking his prattle to be tedious, Even so, or with much more contempt, men's eyes Did scowl on gentle Richard."
  By: William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (York at V, ii)
  Acting Quotes
• "And, like a strutting player, whose conceit Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich To hear the wooden dialogue and sound 'Twixt his stretch footing and the scaffoldage, Such to-be-pitied and o'er-wrested seeming He acts thy greatness in; . . ."
  By: William Shakespeare, The History of Troilus and Cressida (Ulysses at I, iii)
  Acting Quotes
• "A beggary account of empty boxes. . . ."
  By: William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Romeo at V, i)
  Acting Quotes
• "A hit, a very palpable hit."
  By: William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Osric at V, ii)
  Acting Quotes
• "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature."
  By: William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at III, ii)
  Acting Quotes
• "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our 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 it gently, for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness."
  By: William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at III, ii)
  Acting Quotes
• "O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly (not to speak it profanely), that neither having th' accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably."
  By: William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at III, ii)
  Acting Quotes
• "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do. Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears. . . ."
  By: William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at II, ii)
  Acting Quotes
• "The play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
  By: William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at II, ii)
  Acting Quotes
• "Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd, . . ."
  By: William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at II, ii)
  Acting Quotes
• "I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene, Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ."
  By: William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at II, ii)
  Acting Quotes
• "Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear? Let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live."
  By: William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at II, ii)
  Acting Quotes