26 Quotes by Eleanora Duse

To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.

We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air: the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.

Interpretation is the evidence of growth and knowledge, the latter through sorrow ? that great teacher.

Work means so many things! So many! Among other things, work also means freedom. ... Without it even the miracle of love is only a cruel deception.

First one works alone through the mind, then before the public through experience.

Anyone who presumes to teach art has no understanding of it.

Precepts, conventions - above all traditions - have no value in art.

... does it seem to you that it is possible to speak of Art? It would be the same as explaining love!

If I were twenty or thirty years younger, I would start afresh in this field with the certainty of accomplishing much. But I should have to learn from the bottom up, forgetting the theatre entirely and concentrating on the special medium of this new art. My mistake, and that of many others, lay in employing "theatrical" techniques despite every effort to avoid them. Here is something quite, quite fresh, a penetrating form of visual poetry, an untried exponent of the human soul. Alas, I am too old for it!