Marcel Marceau Quotes

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Marcel Marceau

Profession : Actor

Birth : March 22, 1923

In a clown, we see what we do that makes us laugh and cry. I kept the white face, the tradition of the Pierrot. My clown became a romantic and stylized figure. I wanted to be an abstract and concrete figure, a symbol of humanity.

Marcel Marceau

Bip is the romantic and burlesque hero for our time. Bip is a modern-day Don Quixote.

Marcel Marceau

It's good to shut up sometimes.

Marcel Marceau

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

Marcel Marceau

In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people.

Marcel Marceau

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?

Marcel Marceau

Mime is an art beyond words. It is the art of the essential. And you cannot lie. You have to show the truth.

Marcel Marceau

What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.

Marcel Marceau

To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.

Marcel Marceau

The great problem of humanity is life and death. Every person dreams of becoming invisible one day.

Marcel Marceau

When you're in a play, 50 percent is the genius of the actor, 50 percent is the genius of the author. When a mime is not perfect, you see nothing.

Marcel Marceau

I am a company in myself. My repertoire has become a bible for all mimes in the world.

Marcel Marceau

I have never been a victim of antisemitism - if you put to one side my war-time experience. That said, I am lucky not to have been sent into a concentration camp.

Marcel Marceau

With time, art developed Bip, my alter ego. He was not only a lion tamer or a street musician but a soldier revealing the tragedy of ephemeral life.

Marcel Marceau

I don't want our youth to become anti-romantic. We have to make room for the soul.

Marcel Marceau

Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.

Marcel Marceau

I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth. I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.

Marcel Marceau

Silence in the turmoil of the theater world made me survive 50 years without speaking on a stage, only to say 'No' in Mel Brooks' film, 'Silent Movie.'

Marcel Marceau

Dance is in the air, pirouettes, very difficult. Mime is on the floor, like Spanish dancing perhaps, and very often in slow motion.

Marcel Marceau

I wouldn't imagine I would become famous in America for my talk shows.

Marcel Marceau