Marcel Marceau
What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.Collection: Attitude
The great problem of humanity is life and death. Every person dreams of becoming invisible one day.Collection: Dreams
Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.Collection: Music
It's good to shut up sometimes.Collection: Good
I wouldn't imagine I would become famous in America for my talk shows.Collection: Famous
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.Collection: Romantic
Bip is the romantic and burlesque hero for our time. Bip is a modern-day Don Quixote.Collection: Romantic
To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.Collection: Communication
Mime is an art beyond words. It is the art of the essential. And you cannot lie. You have to show the truth.
Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?
In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people.
Never get a mime talking. He won't stop.
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.
Dance is in the air, pirouettes, very difficult. Mime is on the floor, like Spanish dancing perhaps, and very often in slow motion.
I don't want our youth to become anti-romantic. We have to make room for the soul.
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.'
All wars are criminal.
There is only one Marceau.
I am a company in myself. My repertoire has become a bible for all mimes in the world.
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.
Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.
Today, my heart and soul lives peacefully for the hope that the 21st century will have to face a great challenge, a peaceful struggle for the enlightenment of humanity.
I was brought up in a Jewish home, but I was brought up to be human - not fanatical, which is something that I don't appreciate at all. I learned to become a humanist and not to dwell on the differences between Jews and Christians.
I started under my master, Etienne Decroux, who taught me a new grammar for mime he called statuary mime. This grammar brings style creations. Without it, no art survives.
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.
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.
Mime makes the invisible, visible and the visible, invisible.Collection: Invisible
In a moment of grace, we can grasp eternity in the palm of our hand. This is the gift given to creative individuals who can identify with the mysteries of life through art.Collection: Art
Life is a cycle, and mime is particularly suitable for showing fluidity, transformation, metamorphosis. Words can keep people apart; mime can be a bridge between them.Collection: Bridges
Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities.Collection: Borders
A mime is a terrible thing to waste.Collection: Waste
Words can be deceitful, but pantomime necessarily is simple, clear and directCollection: Inspiration
No art is superior to another one, but every art looks for expertise and perfection. This is life, which continues; this is why there is no death. There is continuation. There is no silence. There is a continuation of thought.Collection: Art
Silence is like a flame, you see?Collection: Flames
Chaplin made me laugh and cry without saying a word. I had an instinct. I was touched by the soul of Chaplin - Mime is not an imitator but a creator.Collection: Laughing
Fathers, I do not practice. I'm not religious in life, but when I perform "The Creation of the World" and when my soul is touched by the confrontation of "Good and Evil," then God enters in me.Collection: Religious
One can feel the urge, the need to give, coming from within him. He is such a pure and true person. It’s my deepest, most heartfelt conviction that Michael Jackson is a good person, a fine young man with an incredible burden - responsibility - to carry on his shoulders.Collection: Responsibility