Top 38 Quotes & Sayings by Marcel Marceau

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French actor Marcel Marceau.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Marcel Marceau was a French actor and mime artist most famous for his stage persona, "Bip the Clown". He referred to mime as the "art of silence" and he performed professionally worldwide for over 60 years. As a Jewish youth, he lived in hiding and worked with the French Resistance during most of World War II, giving his first major performance to 3,000 troops after the liberation of Paris in August. Following the war, he studied dramatic art and mime in Paris.

French - Actor | March 22, 1923 - September 22, 2007

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

All wars are criminal.

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

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

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

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

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.

Marcel Marceau

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.

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

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

Marcel Marceau

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

Marcel Marceau

There is only one Marceau.

Marcel Marceau

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.

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

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

Marcel Marceau

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

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

Never get a mime talking. He won't stop.

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

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

Marcel Marceau

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

Marcel Marceau

It's good to shut up sometimes.

Marcel Marceau

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

Marcel Marceau

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

Marcel Marceau

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.

Marcel Marceau

Words can be deceitful, but pantomime necessarily is simple, clear and direct

Marcel Marceau

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.

Marcel Marceau

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.

Marcel Marceau

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.

Marcel Marceau

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.

Marcel Marceau

A mime is a terrible thing to waste.

Marcel Marceau

Mime makes the invisible, visible and the visible, invisible.

Marcel Marceau

Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities.

Marcel Marceau

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.

Marcel Marceau

Silence is like a flame, you see?

Marcel Marceau