Welcome to our collection of quotes by Charlie Chaplin. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, The Tramp, and is considered one of the most important figures in the history of the film industry. His career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977, and encompassed both adulation and controversy.
Chaplin's childhood in London was one of poverty and hardship, as his father was absent and his mother struggled financially, and he was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine. When he was 14, his mother was committed to a mental asylum. Chaplin began performing at an early age, touring music halls and later working as a stage actor and comedian. At 19, he was signed to the prestigious Fred Karno company, which took him to America. He was scouted for the film industry and began appearing in 1914 for Keystone Studios. He soon developed the Tramp persona and formed a large fan base. He directed his own films and continued to hone his craft as he moved to the Essanay, Mutual, and First National corporations. By 1918, he was one of the best-known figures in the world.
In 1919, Chaplin co-founded the distribution company United Artists, which gave him complete control over his films. His first feature-length film was The Kid (1921), followed by A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928). He initially refused to move to sound films in the 1930s, instead producing City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) without dialogue. He became increasingly political, and his first sound film was The Great Dictator (1940), which satirised Adolf Hitler. The 1940s were a decade marked with controversy for Chaplin, and his popularity declined rapidly. He was accused of communist sympathies, and some members of the press and public found his involvement in a paternity suit, and marriages to much younger women, scandalous. An FBI investigation was opened, and Chaplin was forced to leave the United States and settle in Switzerland. He abandoned the Tramp in his later films, which include Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952), A King in New York (1957), and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967).
Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, edited, starred in, and composed the music for most of his films. He was a perfectionist, and his financial independence enabled him to spend years on the development and production of a picture. His films are characterised by slapstick combined with pathos, typified in the Tramp's struggles against adversity. Many contain social and political themes, as well as autobiographical elements. He received an Honorary Academy Award for "the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century" in 1972, as part of a renewed appreciation for his work. He continues to be held in high regard, with The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator often ranked on lists of the greatest films of all time.
I have many problems in my life. But my lips don't know that. They always smile.
Life laughs at you when you are unhappy; Life smiles at you when you are happy; But life salutes you when you make others happy.
Actors search for rejection. If they don't get it they reject themselves.
Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
I believe in the power of laughter and tears as an antidote to hatred and terror.
Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.
I am not religious in the dogmatic sense... I neither believe nor disbelieve in anything.
Dictators free themselves by enslaving others. They work not for your benefit, but their own.
Life can be wonderful if you're not afraid of it. All it takes is courage, imagination ... and a little dough.
I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood.
I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, all of which I am the sum total.
That's what all we are: amateurs. We don't live long enough to be anything else.
My pain may be the reason for somebody's laugh.
But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody's pain.
I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.
Beauty is an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels.
I am known in parts of the world by people who have never heard of Jesus Christ.
It seems to me that my mother was the most splendid woman I ever knew... I have met a lot of people knocking around the world since, but I have never met a more thoroughly refined woman than my mother. If I have amounted to anything, it will be due to her.
My faith is in the unknown, in all that we do not understand by reason; I believe that what is beyond our comprehension is a simple fact in other dimensions, and that in the realm of the unknown there is an infinite power for good.
Words seem so futile, so feeble. You are all such lovely, beautiful people ... thank you.
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl.
Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
In this book I do not intend to give a blow-by-blow description of a sex bout: I find them inartistic, clinical and unpoetic. The circumstances that lead up to sex I find more interesting.
Nothing is more important than the moving image;
except for my cup of coffee in the morning.
Man is an animal with primary instincts of survival. Consequently his ingenuity has developed first and his soul afterwards. The progress of science is far ahead of man's ethical behavior.
In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature -- or go insane.
We must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature, or go insane.
We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness -- not by each other's misery.
In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.
The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
The cinema is little more than a fad. It's canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.
My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.
So when I cease to be I want to go back...to the sea! Oh for the life of a sardine! That is the life for me!
My character of the Tramp, the millions of workers symbolized in that one figure.
They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.
The people are applauding you because none of them understands you and applauding me because everybody understands me.
I remain just one thing, and one thing only -- and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.
There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.
The rights of citizenship will be taken away from all Jews and other non-Aryans. They are inferior and therefore enemies of the state. It is the duty of all true Aryans to hate and despise them.
We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
Life is laughter when seen in a long shot, but it is a tragedy when seen in a close-up.
I hope we shall abolish war and settle all differences at the conference table I hope we shall abolish all hydrogen and atom bombs before they abolish us first.
Over the years I have discovered that ideas come through an intense desire for them; continually desiring, the mind becomes a watchtower on the lookout for incidents that may excite the imagination.
This is a story of a period between two World Wars -- an interim in which Insanity cut loose. Liberty took a nose dive, and Humanity was kicked around somewhat.
The building is a special place because of its architecture; But it's people who make it special by participating in it.
Even when I was in the orphanage, when I was roaming the street trying to find enough to eat, even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world. I had to feel the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it, you go down to defeat.
Sound has spoiled the most ancient of the world's arts, the art of pantomime, and has canceled out the great beauty that is silence.
I've arrived at the age where a platonic friendship can be sustained on the highest moral plane.
Where words leave off, gesture begins. Don't we speak of a person being speechless with rage, dancing with impatience, setting his teeth? The final motions of the soul are speechless, animal, grotesque, or of an incomparable beauty.
Through humour, we see in what seems rational, the irrational; in what seems important, the unimportant.
Smile, though your heart is aching
Smile, even though it's breaking
When there are clouds in the sky, you'll get by
If you smile through your pain and sorrow
Smile and maybe tomorrow,
You'll see the sun come shining through for you.
Hair is vitally personal to children. They weep vigorously when it is cut for the first time; no matter how it grows, bushy, straight or curly, they feel they are being shorn of a part of their personality.
As for politics, I'm an anarchist. I hate governments and rules and fetters. Can't stand caged animals. People must be free.
Think about yourself at least once in your life otherwise you may miss the best comedy in this world.
The Kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you!
Life is a play that does not allow testing. So, sing, cry, dance, laugh and live intensely, before the curtain closes and the piece ends with no applause.
You need Power, only when you want to do something harmful otherwise Love is enough to get everything done.
Life laughs at you when you are unhappy; Life smiles at you when you are happy; But, life salutes you when you make others happy.
Your Pain May Give Laugh To Somebody But Your Laugh Shouldn't Give Pain To Anybody.
Perfect love is the most beautiful of all frustrations because it is more than one can express.