Eleanora Duse Quotations

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.

When we grow old, there can only be one regret - not to have given enough of ourselves.

The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.

The weaker partner in a marriage is the one who loves the most.

I did not use paint, I made myself up morally.

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if the simplest things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.

Ibsen is like this room where we are sitting, with all the tables and chairs. Do I care whether you have twenty or twenty-five links on your chain? Hedda Gabler, Nora and the rest: it is not that I want! I want Rome and the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Athens; I want beauty, and the flame of life.

To save the Theatre, the Theatre must be destroyed, and actors and actresses all die of the Plague ... they make art impossible.

I use everything that I pick up in my memory, and everything that vibrates in my soul.

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

All that I have to offer as an artist is the revelation of my soul

To help, to continually help and share, that is the sum of all knowledge; that is the meaning of art.

If I had my will, I would live in a ship on the sea and never come nearer to humanity than that!

I have the greatest of all riches: that of not desiring them.