Acting is in everything but the words. — Stella Adler

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. — Stella Adler

The theatre–acting, creating, interpreting–means total involvement, the totality of heart, mind and spirit. — Stella Adler

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. — Stella Adler

The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings. — Stella Adler

To grow: that is your deepest and truest need when you say, ‘I want to be an actor.’ — Stella Adler

Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what’s beneath the word. — Stella Adler

Growth as an actor and as a human being are synonymous. — Stella Adler

The ultimate aim of the training is to create an actor who can be responsible for his artistic development and achievement. — Stella Adler

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors. — Stella Adler

Our heritage as actors goes back thousands of years, and we have to feel as comfortable in the clothes, and the language of Sophocles as we do in our sneakers. — Stella Adler

The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays. — Stella Adler

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. — Stella Adler

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. — Stella Adler

The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind. — Stella Adler

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

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. — Stella Adler

You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences. — Stella Adler

Be innocent, wise and ninety–five. — Stella Adler

In life, as on the stage, it’s not who I am but what I do that’s the measure of my worth and the secret of my success. All the rest is showiness, arrogance and conceit. — Stella Adler

Life is boring. The weather is boring. Actors must not be boring. — Stella Adler

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We’re not scientists. We don’t always have to make the logical, reasonable leap. — Stella Adler

It’s not important to know who you are. It’s important to know what you do, and then to do it like hercules! — Stella Adler

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

The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation. — Stella Adler

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

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. — Stella Adler

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

You act with your soul. That’s why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life. — Stella Adler