Stella Adler Quotes

life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one

Actors need a kind of aggression, a kind of inner force. Don't be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average. Find the killer in you.

The thing that makes you say, "I want to do something" - that is the beginning of talent.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

Acting is in everything but the words.

You have to do something. If you do something, you become somebody. Even a daffodil does something, has a profession. It gives off scent, professionally.

You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing.

You cannot afford to confine your studies to the classroom. The universe and all of history is your classroom.

Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.

Sometimes life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one

Emotions aren't doable. Actions are doable, and if you do them correctly, they prompt the feelings.

You will fail. That's great. Here's a secret for you - that's the only way you can learn. Learning has to cost you something. If you fail but learn something from your failure, you will grow.

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.

When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.

Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one. Stella Adler

No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.

Tell yourself that the world is outside, that it's not to be hidden from you, that you are going to thrust yourself forward and be relaxed in the world. You have chosen a field where you're going to be hurt to the blood. But to retreat from the pain is death

Don’t use your conscious past. Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don’t want you to be stuck with your own life. It’s too little.

You'll begin to act when you can forget your technique - when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously.

You should want to act only because you want to be led to something bigger in life.

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.

The actor must be full of passion. If he's too cool he's better off as the manager of a company, not someone who appears on the stage.

You'll never really be great unless you aim high.

Acting can be the healthiest profession in the world, because it allows you to do things you can't do in real life. It allows you to understand more than just what life provides you.

That spark has to be kept alive.

Acting is reacting.

...actors today think that being true is being nice, or being some other "set" thing. That is not the truth. That is your miserable habit of boring everybody to death.

Acting requires a creative and compassionate attitude. It must aim to lift life up to a higher level of meaning and not tear it down or demean it. The actor's search is a generous quest for that larger meaning. That's why acting is never to be done passively.

If you can't take both sides, it means you can only play yourself.

By taking elements you observe in life, you can develop qualities in your acting life that you don't ordinarily call upon in your personal life.

We dress the way we think.

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. —STELLA ADLER

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. -- Stella Adler

You have to understand your best. Your best isn't Barrymore's best or Olivier's best or my best, but your own. Every person has his norm. And in that norm every person is a star. Olivier could stand on his head and still not be you. Only you can be you. What a privilege! Nobody can reach what you can if you do it. So do it. We need your best, your voice, your body. We don't need for you to imitate anybody, because that would be second best. And second best is no better than your worst.

If you learn how to work and grow, you will find that your life cannot be destroyed by the outside world. If you have to work eight hours a day, give three or one that belongs to you without money. This "Who Are You?" has to be reinforced.

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

Be innocent, wise and ninety-five.

Th e basic principle of Method acting is that you should draw on your own personal experience—“You know how you felt when you were seven, and your dog died? Well, think about that when you’re playing Hamlet.” It sounds simple enough, but it involves learning lots of techniques to heighten your capacity for emotional recall. Those techniques were westernized from the original Russian templates by people like Lee Strasberg, who taught James Dean and Al Pacino, and Stella Adler—another teacher in New York at the time—who taught Brando.

The leveling down of the European man is our greatest danger. This is the prospect that depresses us. Today we see nothing that wants to become greater. We suspect that all goes ever downward, becoming thinner, more sleazy, smarter, cozier, more ordinary, more indifferent. Exactly here lies the crisis. With the fear of man, we have also lost the love of man - reverence for him, hope in him. The human prospect wearies us. What is the current nihilism if it is not that? We are tired of man.

When it's really fashionable, there's something wrong. An actor once came up to me and said, "I'm a Meth. . ." and he mumbled something. I said, "Get out of here. I don't want that around. It's too corrupt.

The result of this is a disrespect for the world in general and a foreignness to anything around him that isn't immediately recognizable to his everyday habits. He has even begun to lose perspective on what his own assets and faults are, because he has nothing to measure these things against.

We are in danger, all of us, and I will give you an example why—a journalist I knew years ago. He was a good journalist. He went around the world and recorded what he saw and came to various conclusions. He said, Paris is this and London is that—and Greece is worth a couple of days. He felt two days was enough to give him an understanding of Greece. What that statement reveals is that the basis of our Western culture now, and of professional man, is middle-class. The middle class makes statements and knows nothing. You and I are the middle class and must think of ourselves as middle-class. We are middleclass actors, middle-class journalists, middle-class plumbers and morticians. The creation of the modern theater took a genius like Ibsen.

He explained in detail how important it was to use circumstances. He said where you are is what you are, and how you are, and what you can be.