Thursday, January 8, 2009

Hypocrite

I find something new every day that reminds me of my love for the art of theatre. I love rediscovering that passion - it reminds me why I do what I do, even when I get discouraged by the sheer magnitude of the struggle that awaits me. It lights a fire under my ass and makes me want it more, even when it looks impossible.


Players are “the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time;” the motley representatives of human nature. They are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness. The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves. Today kings, tomorrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing. Made up of mimic laughter and tears, passing from the extremes of joy or woe at the prompter’s call, they wear the livery of other men’s fortunes; their very thoughts are not their own. They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. The stage is an epitome, a bettered likeness of the world, with the dull part left out: and, indeed, with this omission, it is nearly big enough to hold all the rest.

~William Hazlitt

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