Spolin Quotes

#1. Your words...
I hold them deep
like ancient skins
hold wrinkles.

Sanober Khan

#2. We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything.

Viola Spolin

#3. One must be chary of words because they turn into cages.

Viola Spolin

#4. Get out of your head, into your space and await the invisible stranger

Viola Spolin

#5. You stay elite by constantly moving forward.

Bob Myers

#6. Becoming a father has made my life a lot more interesting. It's like everything slows down because time goes slower, and you notice that you're actually awake for so many more hours. Your waking hours elongate because you're doing things at a child's pace.

Aidan Gillen

#7. Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?

Philip Gilbert Hamerton

#8. Play touches and stimulates vitality, awakening the whole person - mind, body, intelligence and creativity.

Viola Spolin

#9. It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.

Billy Collins

#10. The creation of a nuclear weapons convention is not only achievable, it is imperative if civilisation is to survive.

C. G. Weeramantry

#11. Creativity is not the clever rearranging of the known.

Viola Spolin

#12. That which is not yet known comes out of that which is not yet here.

Viola Spolin

#13. It stands to reason that if we direct all our efforts towards reaching a goal, we stand in grave danger of losing everything on which we have based our daily activities. For when a goal is superimposed on an activity instead of evolving out of it, we often feel cheated when we reach it.

Viola Spolin

#14. As a species, we've always been discoverers and adventurers, and space and the deep ocean are some of the last frontiers.

Paul Allen

#15. Theater Games are a process applicable to any field, discipline, or subject matter which creates a place where full participation, communication, and transformation can take place.

Viola Spolin

#16. The techniques of the theater are the techniques of communicating.

Viola Spolin

#17. It is highly possible that what is called 'talented behavior' is simply a greater individual capacity for experiencing. From this point of view, it is in the increasing of the individual capacity for experiencing that the untold potentiality of a personality can be evoked.

Viola Spolin

#18. [B]eing the member of the church means belonging to a messed-up group, an untidy gathering of people like you or me who continually fail to live up to the ideal. But we keep coming just for that reason; we need the help and forgiveness that flow from the offering of Christ.

Don Talafous

#19. The unknown is where we go to find new things and intuition is how we find them.

Viola Spolin

#20. If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn, and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach.

Viola Spolin

#21. The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience, there is no theater. Everything done is ultimately for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, fellow players, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.

Viola Spolin

#22. My vision is a world of accessible intuition.

Viola Spolin

#23. Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves.

Viola Spolin

#24. When the rational mind is shut off, we have the possibility of intuition.

Viola Spolin

#25. General improvisations often give actors an insight beyond their words by helping them to 'see the word' and achieve a reality for the scene.

Viola Spolin

#26. If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses

John Ruskin

#27. Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become stageworthy.

Viola Spolin

#28. Don't initiate! Follow the initiator! Follow the follower.

Viola Spolin

#29. First teach a person to develop to the point of his limitation and then-pfft!-break the limitation.

Viola Spolin

#30. God does not rule by the consent of His subjects but by His sovereign authority. His reign extends over me whether I vote for Him or not.

R.C. Sproul

#31. You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash; and then for a very long time you are old.

Sylvia Townsend Warner