The words and wisdom of Constantin Stanislavski:

I have told you how we were educated in our childhood and youth. Compare our life with the life of the present generation of youth brought up on a regime of poverty and danger. We spent our youth in a Russia that was peaceful; we drank from the full cup of life. The present generation has grown up amidst war, hunger, world catastrophe, mutual misunderstanding and hate. We knew much joy and did not share it with those near to us to any great degree, and now we are paying for our egotism. The new generation does not know the joy that we knew, it seeks and creates joy in agreement with the circumstances of life, and tries each moment to regain and make its own again those years of youth that it has lost. It is not for us to condemn them for this. It is for us to sympathize with them, to follow with interest and good wishes the unrolling evolution of the new art and the new life created by the laws of nature. (MLIA)

The words and wisdom of Constantin Stanislavski:

To the accompaniment of a pianist’s improvisations, the pupils lived for hours in rhythm, explaining in their actions how they felt the music. Relying on the same bases of the sensations of inner rhythm and action they learned to walk, to do gymnastics, plastic and other exercises in my system for the development of correct consciousness of self in which rhythm plays a great and important part. There was a whole series of exercises and classes for the development of the feeling for the word and speech, for an altogether exceptional amount of attention was paid to diction in the opera. (MLIA)

The words and wisdom of Constantin Stanislavski:

In a series of variegated exercises I tried to develop in my pupils not the outward rhythm of movement and action, but the inner rhythm of that unseen energy which calls out movement and action. In this manner I was able to develop in my pupils the sensation of movement and gesture, walking and the entire inner pulse of life. These are purely practical methods and theses, which are useful in our work, and it would be a mistake to look in them for any scientific bases, from which I feel myself to be very far. (MLIA)

The words and wisdom of Constantin Stanislavski:

It is better not to read verse at all, than read it in the way which is considered lawful, requisite, and patented in the sense of poetry and musicalness. Rhythm does not consist in stressing iambs and anapaests. I cannot bear the marchlike beating out of rhythm. I want to sleep when I hear the reading of verse in a solemnly monotonous voice with chromatic tones crawling up. I cannot bear vocal leaps to the terza or quinta with a fall at the end of each line to a secunda. There is nothing more vulgar than a made, sweetish, quasi-poetical voice in lyric poems, which rises and falls like waves during a dead calm. (MLIA)

The words and wisdom of Constantin Stanislavski:

The auditorium was filled by a crowd of simple workingmen and peasants. They listened to what was going on on the stage in the deepest of silences. The serious thoughtful mood . . . prevented them from staging an ordinary theatrical ovation. After the end of the performance the spectators sat for a long time without any movement and departed without any noise, as if they were leaving a temple of worship after prayer. (MLIA)

The words and wisdom of Constantin Stanislavski:

Our art is not eternal, but it is the most inescapable of all arts so far as our contemporaries are concerned. What strength there is in it! Its action is created not by one man, but simultaneously by a group of actors, artists, stage directors, and musicians; not by one art, but simultaneously by many most diverse arts, music, drama, painting, declamation, dancing. This theatrical action is received not by one man, but simultaneously by a crowd of human beings which develops a mass emotion that sharpens the moments of receptivity. (MLIA)

The words and wisdom of Constantin Stanislavski:

It remains unknown why certain places in a play are laughed at by everybody at all performances in one city, while altogether different places in the same play produce the same results in other cities. We did not know why the new spectator did not accept the famous laughing places in a play as such, nor did we know how to change our individual and collective performances in order to reach the seat of his emotions. (MLIA)

The words and wisdom of Constantin Stanislavski:

What torture it is to feel truthfully but to incarnify your true feelings falsely and in unworthy form. I bore these pains for two seasons in . . . [a] role beyond my strength. . . . What is important is that after this production I could say to myself: “I know that I know nothing.” (MLIA)

The words and wisdom of Constantin Stanislavski:

First-class workers must receive first-class pay. (MLIA)