The dramatic art would appear to be rather a feminine art; it contains in itself all the artifices which belong to the province of... woman: the desire to please, facility to express emotions and hide defects, and the faculty of assimilation which is the real essence of woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.... It is t...he rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What matters poverty? What matters anything to him who is "enamoured" of our art? Does he not carry in himself every joy and every... beauty?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The theater-goer in conventional dramatic theater says: Yes, I've felt that way, too. That's the way I am. That's life. That's the... way it will always be. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is no escape for him. That's great art--Everything is self- evident. I am made to cry with those who cry, and laugh with those who laugh. But the theater-goer in the epic theater says: I would never have thought that. You can't do that. That's very strange, practically unbelievable. That has to stop. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is an escape for him. That's great art--nothing is self-evident. I am made to laugh about those who cry, and cry about those who laugh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man.... No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control o...ver what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is t...o things made by his art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art--that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, express...ed by every means available to the arts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »