Acting Quotes : Great acting quotes from famous actors and sayings with beautiful images to get inspired and motivated for success. A great actor uses his magic of acting to make any movie or drama real. They completely immersed the audience in their acting journey. If we are happy, we are happy to continue watching him/her act. Through the information-rich, wise, humorous, witty, and funny acting quotes collected here, you can have a deeper understanding of this fascinating craft.
People’s enthusiasm for famous actors is mainly because they are not afraid of difficulties and take acting as their profession. All aspiring actors are looking for the secret of success. What is better than following and listening to someone who has already done something? Take a look at these famous acting quotes from actors you must have known, and find out what your favorite actors like. Here is our list of great acting quotes and sayings. Let’s have a look at these famous quotes about acting from your favorite actors.
Great Acting Quotes
- “An actor has to burn inside with an outer ease.” —Michael Chekhov
- “No matter where you are from, your dreams are valid.” —Lupita Nyong’o
- “I’m sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.” —Ralph Fiennes
- “If you know you are going to fail, then fail gloriously.” —Cate Blanchett
- “Vomit first. Then try to make something pretty with it.” —Tatiana Maslany
- “Accept your lack of knowledge and use it as your asset.” —Natalie Portman
- “You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too.” —Denzel Washington
- “Acting is not about being famous. It’s about exploring the human soul.” —Annette Bening
- “Acting is really about having the courage to fail in front of people.” —Adam Driver
- “I think the crucial thing about being an actor is to be doing it.” —Chiwetel Ejiofor
- “I think you should take your job seriously, but not yourself. That is the best combination.” —Dame Judi Dench
- “Actors should not feel scared, about the fact that they’re scared. I think it’s a good sign.” —Naomie Harris
- “One day, the people that didn’t believe in you will tell everyone how they met you.” —Johnny Depp
- “The only way I can move past the absurdity of what I do, is to commit to the point of absurdity.” —Jake Gyllenhaal
- “What sets you apart can feel like a burden, but it’s not. A lot of the time it’s what makes you great.” —Emma Stone
- “To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.” —Marlon Brando
- “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” —William Shakespeare
- “Acting requires faith. You just have to believe that you are the person you’re playing and that what is happening is happening to you.” —Ivana Chubbuck
- “I think there was something in me at a young age that was not worried about success, but was worried about becoming a better actor.” —Paul Dano
- “Find out who you are & embrace it. It’s so much easier to face criticism when you are comfortable in your own skin.” —Amy Adams
- “I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work.” —Meryl Streep
- “There is a kind of invisible thread between the actor and the audience, and when it’s there it’s stunning and there is nothing to match that.” —Maggie Smith
- “The thing I like about acting is being able to lose yourself completely in someone else. I’m not that comfortable when I get recognized.” —Ellen Page
- “Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too.” —Meryl Streep
- “As an actor you try to bring as much of yourself to a part to try and create a feeling of authenticity and emotional truth and resonance.” —Jesse Eisenberg
- “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
Great Acting Quotes
- “Once you are gold, you need to keep yourself golden. Even the best of it needs to be cleaned and re-exposed and put into the world again.” —Susan Batson
- “To fulfil a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.” —Bette Davis
- “Acting is a form of self-expression, it’s not becoming someone else, and it’s not playing make believe; it’s about using the fiction of being someone else to express something about yourself.” —Maggie Gyllenhaal
- “If any of the work, that any of us do, contributes to the stretching of culture, the stretching of boundaries of empathy that’s expected of an audience… that’s the Holy Grail.” —Riz Ahmed
- “Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” —Oscar Wilde
- “Acting isn’t something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you’re going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.” —Lee Strasberg
- “If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don’t have it don’t bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can’t fake emotion.” —Sanford Meisner
- “When you do something that people respond to, and then you start altering the blueprint for what worked, it’s pretty fear-inducing. But sometimes, you have to do that, in order to push the boundaries.” —Rami Malek
- “You can’t learn to act unless you’re criticized. If you tie that criticism to your childhood insecurities you’ll have a terrible time. Instead, you must take criticism objectively, pertaining it only to the work being done.” —Sanford Meisner
- “Flip it. Hit the stage and go; “Keep up”. But you’ve got to do the work. You can’t do that without preparing the work. The great ones work that hard all the way to the end.” —Jeff Daniels
- “When you work on anything, you want to find the range of impulses. Which ones get portrayed is another question, but you want to have that complexity and that fullness, even if you’re playing a cartoon character.” —Willem Dafoe
- “It’s tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There’s the all-consuming fear of failure… and there’s also confidence – you have to be confident to try new things – And they fight each other all the time.” —Jessica Chastain
- “If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” —Bruce Lee
- “All I would tell people is to hold on to what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You’ve got to find it on your own terms.” —Harrison Ford
- “Life has to be everything. It can’t be all sad. It can’t be all peaches and cream. Because the lows have you appreciate the highs. And the highs give you perspective on the lows. If it’s not everything, it becomes flat or mundane.” —Sterling K Brown
- “Study, find all the good teachers and study with them, get involved in acting to act, not to be famous or for the money. Do plays. It’s not worth it if you are just in it for the money. You have to love it.” —Philip Seymour Hoffman
- “I think that young women and little girls need to see that they don’t have to be the damsel in distress. They don’t have to not show their strength. They don’t have to be whatever the stereotype is or the tropes that we go to in our minds.” —Octavia Spencer
- “Every movie I make I find kind of excruciating. I get a lot back from it, but I feel like I’m kind of always working at the edge of my ability. I guess that’s what I’m looking for when I go to work. I am trying to become the edge.” —Michelle Williams
- “I feel like telling stories is a spiritual exercise and I think that it’s something that we need as a culture and as humans. You put your nightmares up there, you put your dreams up there and people can see them better because they can stand outside of it and recognize themselves inside it.” —Holly Hunter
- “Be in the moment. Period. Just be there. Because if you get all like, ‘Oh I got to do this big thing.’ It just never works. It just doesn’t work. You’ve just got to let go. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Whatever you do is ok, just be truthful, honest, real, and that’s all you can ask for.” —Robert De Niro
- “Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. Don’t be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve – in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you’ve had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For a long time… maybe I felt inauthentic or something, like my voice wasn’t worth hearing… So if you’ve got something to say, say it from the rooftops.” —Tom Hiddleston
- “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.” —Stella Adler
Famous Acting Quotes
- “Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” —Sanford Meisner
- “Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors.” —Constantin Stanislavski
- “The gratification comes in the doing, not in the results.” —James Dean
- “If you get a chance to act in a room that somebody else has paid rent for, then you’re given a free chance to practice your craft.” —Phillip Seymour Hoffman
- “For me, our job as artists is to serve the story, serve the director, and serve the fellow actors. And if you do that, by osmosis you’re serving yourself because you’ll get the best out of yourself.” —David Oyelowo
Inspirational Quotes about Acting
- “The only failure is not to try.” —George Clooney
- “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” —Steve Martin
- “I’m a big believer in ‘never say never’.” —Jim Parsons
- “The best way to guarantee a loss is to quit.” —Morgan Freeman
- “I say luck is when an opportunity comes along and you’re prepared for it.” —Denzel Washington
- “After many years of self-flagellation, I’ve realized that beating myself up doesn’t get me anywhere.” —Chris Pine
- “You’re not going there to get a job. You’re going there to present what you do.” —Bryan Cranston
- “If you’re an actor, even a successful one, you’re still waiting for the phone to ring.” —Kevin Bacon
- “Your regrets aren’t what you did, but what you didn’t do. So I take every opportunity.” —Cameron Diaz
- “I’ve come across many actors like me who didn’t have a backup. That drive & will made it work.” —Clive Owen
- “I was armored enough to come out to Hollywood. And I knew that I would get told ‘no’ a million times.” —Taraji Henson
- “If I get rejected for a part, I pick myself up and say ‘OK not today, maybe tomorrow I’ll get this other part or something’.” —Liam Neeson
- “You have to be totally tough to deal with all those times when you’re being turned down, and then really soft in order to access your character’s emotions.” —Felicity Jones
- “Don’t be afraid to fail. It’s not the end of the world and in many ways it’s the first step toward learning something better and getting better at it.” —Jon Hamm
- “My thought process has always been, I’m excited to show you what my version of this story would look like. You’re going to be able to get a little condensed show. That took the pressure off getting the job” —Tituss Burgess
- “I’ve always approached things with hunger and just enough fear. Plenty of confidence, you know, but just enough fear to work extra hard. Paralyzing fear does nothing, but the kind of fear that makes you nervous enough to really be aware and focused? I like that kind of fear.” —Queen Latifah
Inspiring Quotes on Acting from Famous Actors
- “An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.” —Marlon Brando
- “Without wonder and insight, acting is just a business. With it, it becomes creation.” —Bette Davis
- “Giving voice to characters that have no other voice—that’s the great worth of what we do.” —Meryl Streep
- “We think too much and feel too little.” —Charlie Chaplin
- “When you’re in a theater, it’s about reaching the back rows. When you have a camera in your face, it’s just about knowing the size of the room.” —Corey Stoll
- “For me, our job as artists is to serve the story, serve the director, and serve the fellow actors. And if you do that, by osmosis you’re serving yourself because you’ll get the best out of yourself.” —David Oyelowo
Inspirational Quotes on Acting about Overcoming Challenges
- “If all the circumstances of acting are made too easy, then there’s no grain of sand to make the pearl.” —Peter Sarsgaard
- “If you risk nothing, then you risk everything.” —Geena Davis
- “If you live in the past that’s depression, and if you live in the future that’s anxiety. So you have no choice but to live in the present.” —Sarah Silverman
- “It’s important to say that the more challenging a scene is, in a way, the more fun it is because the more of my job I get to do.” —Daniel Radcliffe
- “Goals on the road to achievement cannot be achieved without discipline and consistency.” —Denzel Washington
- “Learn to live your life—there’s no recipe for it. You can’t go to acting school to learn to be a deep person with a lot of experience to draw from; you can only become that person by feeling, by getting hurt, by feeling incredibly happy, by seeing the world; those are the things that make you richer as a person and give you a much bigger bank to draw from when you bring characters to life.” —Pablo Schreiber
Acting Quotes and Sayings
- “Acting is always a challenge.” —Robert Downey
- “The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.”
- “Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.” —Ellen Barkin
- “Acting is a spiritual quest to touch human beings.” —Larry Moss
- “Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on.” —River Phoenix
- “Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.” —Rosalind Russell
- “Acting is not being emotional, but being able to fully express emotion.” —Kate Reid
- “Acting is magical. Change your look and your attitude, and you can be anyone.” —Alicia Witt
- “Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.” —George Eliot
- “Acting doesn’t bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.” —Marguerite Duras
- “I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules.” —Charlotte Whitton
- “Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.” —Paul Newman
- “Acting is half shame, half glory. Shame at exhibiting yourself, glory when you can forget yourself.” —John Gielgud
- “I must say that acting was good training for the political life that lay ahead of us.” —Nancy Reagan
- “Acting is a nice childish profession – pretending you’re someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.” —Katharine Hepburn
- “Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life. Quitting acting, that’s the sign of maturity.” —Marlon Brando
- “People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world.” —John Stossel
- “Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.”
- “Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You’re never as good as you’d like to be. So there’s always something to hope for.” —Washington Irving
- “Film acting is one of the only industries where you’re criticized for working hard. In any other industry, it’s considered a quality and something to behold.” —Nicolas Cage
- “Acting is a marvelous profession … If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don’t have to think too much about your own character and motivations.” —Dean Koontz
- “Great acting is not easy; anyone who says it is is either shallow or a charlatan. And one of the hardest things about acting is admitting that it is hard.” —Robert Cohen
- “Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we’re acting. Most people do it all day long.” —Marlon Brando
- “As always, with acting, you can’t be too self-conscious. You shouldn’t care about what people are thinking about you at the time because they’re not caring about you, they’re caring about the character.” —Freddie Highmore
- “Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.” —Glenda Jackson
- “Acting is a sport. On stage you must be ready to move like a tennis player on his toes. Your concentration must be keen, your reflexes sharp; your body and mind are in top gear, and the chase is on. Acting is energy. In the theatre people pay to see energy.” —Clive Swift
Funny Acting Quotes
- Actors die so loud.” —Henry Miller
- If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a secret agent.” —Thornton Wilder
- I love acting. It is so much more real than life.” —Oscar Wilde
- The theatre has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.” —W.H. Auden
- Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” —George Burns
- Show me a great actor and I’ll show you a lousy husband. Show me a great actress, and you’ve seen the devil.” —W. C. Fields
What is acting? Quotes That Will Tell You What The Acting Really Is.
- An actor is a fool for God.” —Gerardine Clark
- Stop explaining yourself. Shut up and act!” —Craig MacDonald
- The best acting is instinctive. It’s not intellectual, it’s not mechanical, it’s instinctive.” —Craig MacDonald
- That’s what makes acting so attractive. You get to break all your own rules.” —Gerardine Clark
- Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.” —Bette Davis
- Good acting — real acting is impossible to spot. Do you ever catch talents like Robert Duvall or Kathy Bates acting? No. I defy you to show me where.” —William Esper
Final Thoughts on Acting Quotes
These acting quotes are exactly the same your are looking to get inspired to get success in an acting field. People like to tap the wisdom of experts, hoping to discover the secret of success in a particular field. Have a question about money management? Warren Buffett knows a thing or two. Have political issues? Ask a former president. Want to know about acting? A successful actor can explain better. Share these acting quotes with your friends and colleagues.
Above-mentioned list of famous acting quotes from famous actors that are best and inspiring. Each and every time when you read these inspirational quotes about acting you are inspired and focused, and fall in love with the craft over and over again. May they do the same for you. Hope you have enjoyed these acting quotes from famous actors and these quotes about acting have worked for you.