World Theatre Day 2017 Messages: Quotes About Acting From Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde And Others

Monday is World Theatre Day, a decades-old celebration created by the International Theatre Institute ITI. Observed annually on March 27, the event is intended to promote theater, raise awareness of its value, help centers show off their work and encourage fans to enjoy it, according to its website.

Each World Theatre Day has a message, and this year's came from French movie star Isabelle Huppert.

"I am not myself; I am not an actress; I am just one of the many people that theater uses as a conduit to exist, and it is my duty to be receptive to this," she said in the lengthy statement. "Or, in other words, we do not make theater exist — it is rather thanks to theatre that we exist. The theatre is very strong. It resists and survives everything: wars, censors, penury."

Read: How To Buy ‘Harry Potter And The Cursed Child’ Tickets

Huppert isn't the only person who's written at length about theater. Whether you're an actor, a director or simply an avid fan, you can celebrate World Theatre Day with these quotes, collected from the American Association of Community Theatre and Goodreads:

"All the world's a stage." — William Shakespeare

"Nobody 'becomes' a character. You can't act unless you are who you are." — Marlon Brando

"Onstage, you just have to tell the absolute truth about the character you are playing. You hope you communicate it, and you hope it comes back like a tennis ball. If you're listening to the sound of your own voice, nobody else is. The audience knows, and they freeze on you." — Carol Channing

"Actors need a kind of aggression, a kind of inner force. Don't be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average. Find the killer in you." — Stella Adler

"I love acting. It is so much more real than life." — Oscar Wilde

"Act well your part; there all the honor lies." — Alexander Pope

"If you spend a hundred bucks, or more, to go to the theatre, something should happen to you. Maybe somebody should be asking you some questions about your values, or about the way you think about things. Maybe you should come out of the theatre, something haven happened to you. Maybe you should be changing, or thinking about changing. But if you just go there, and the only thing you worry about is where you left the damn car, then you wasted a hundred bucks." — Edward Albee

"If you want to help the American theatre, don't be an actress, be an audience." — Tallulah Bankhead

"Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behavior that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you." — Eleanor Catton

"The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting." — Sanford Meisner

"Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing." — Ralph Richardson

"Don't act. Be." — April Henry

"The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature." — Shakespeare