Acting Quotes

• "All the world practices the art of acting."
  By: Petronius (Caius Petronius Arbiter)
  Acting Quotes
• "She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B."
  By: Dorothy Rothchild Parker (Mrs. Alan Campbell), referring to Katherine Hepburn's performance in the 1933 play The Lake
  Acting Quotes
• "Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience."
  By: Paul Newman
  Acting Quotes
• "Let gorgeous Tragedy, in sceptred pall, come sweeping by."
  By: John Milton
  Acting Quotes
• "This many-headed monster."
  By: Philip Massinger, Roman Actor (act III, sc. 4)
  Acting Quotes
• "Who teach the mind its proper face to scan, And hold the faithful mirror up to man."
  By: Robert Lloyd, The Actor (l. 265)
  Acting Quotes
• "It is with some violence to the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage."
  By: Charles Lamb (used pseudonym Elia)
  Acting Quotes
• "In really goad acting we should be able to believe that what we hear and see is of our own imagining; it should seem to us as a charming dream."
  By: Joseph Joubert
  Acting Quotes
• "The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give. For we that live to please, must please to live."
  By: Samuel Johnson (a/k/a Dr. Johnson) ("The Great Cham of Literature"), a prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick on opening Drury Lane Theatre
  Acting Quotes
• "Players, sir! I look upon them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint-stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.--But, sir, you will allow, that some players are better than others?--Yes, sir; as some dogs dance better than others."
  By: Samuel Johnson (a/k/a Dr. Johnson) ("The Great Cham of Literature")
  Acting Quotes
• "And Tragedy should blush as much to stoop To the low mimic follies of a farce, As a grave matron would to dance with girls."
  By: Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Of the Art of Poetry
  Acting Quotes
• "It's very hard! Oh, Dick, my boy, It's very hard one can't enjoy A little private spouting; But sure as Lear or Hamlet lives, Up comes our master, Bounce! and gives The tragic Muse a routing."
  By: Thomas Hood, The Stage-Struck Hero
  Acting Quotes
• "To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing."
  By: William Hazlitt (1)
  Acting Quotes
• "They wear the livery of other men's fortunes; their very thoughts are not their own."
  By: William Hazlitt (1)
  Acting Quotes
• "On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting 'Twas only that when he was off, he was acting."
  By: Oliver Goldsmith, Retaliation (l. 101)
  Acting Quotes
• "There is one way by which a strolling player may be ever secure of success; that is, in our theatrical way of expressing it, to make a great deal of the character. To speak and act as in common life is not playing, nor is it what people come to see; natural speaking, like sweet wine, runs glibly over the palate and scarcely leaves any taste behind it; but being high in a part resembles vinegar, which grates upon the taste, and one feels it while he is drinking."
  By: Oliver Goldsmith
  Acting Quotes