Quotes By Charlie Chaplin

Action is more generally understood than words.

Mother illuminated to me the kindliest light this world has ever known, which has endowed literature and the theatre with their greatest and richest themes: love, pity and humanity.

America has changed [...] The gigantic scale of industrial institutions, of press, television, and commercial advertising has completely divorced me from the American way of life. I want the other side of the coin, a simpler personal sense of living.

Pantomime has always been the universal means of communication. It existed as the universal tool long before language was born. Pantomime serves well where languages are in the conflict of a common ignorance.

The silent picture [...] is a universal means of expression. Talking pictures necessarily have a limited field, they are held down to the particular tongues of particular races..(..) There is a constant demand for a medium that is universal in its utility.

Love is life on a higher plain of existence, working through man to unite the forces of nature into a perfect whole. It is the merging force binding every element in existence into a perfect whole.

People miss happiness by chasing after false values and repressing the feelings that make life valuable and beautiful. When you get up in the morning feeling fine your experience during just those few minutes or hours when you are reacting happily to life is an end in itself.

That's all any of us are - amateurs. We don't live long enough to be anything else.

The accumulating complexities of modern life, the kinetic invasion of the twentieth century finds the individual hemmed in by gigantic institutions that threaten from all sides, politically, scientifically and economically. We are becoming the victims of soul-conditioning, of sanctions and permits.

Knowledge inspires courage. I'm not sceptical but I'd sooner know than believe.

I'm unconscious while I'm acting. I live the role and am not myself.

It is incongruous that in this atomic age of speed we are shut in and shut out by passports.

My costume helps me to express my conception of the average man, of almost any man, of myself. The derby, too small, is a striving for dignity. The mustache is vanity. The tightly buttoned coat and the stick and his whole manner are a gesture toward gallantry and dash and 'front.' He is chasing folly, and he knows it. He is trying to meet the world bravely, to put up a bluff, and he knows that, too. He knows it so well that he can laugh at himself and pity himself a little.

My tramp is made up of mimicry.

Time heals, and experience teaches that the secret of happiness is in service to others.

I could kill laughs more quickly by overdoing something than by any other method.

My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist.

One either rises to an occasion or succumbs to it.

The heart and the mind ... what an enigma.

To help a friend in need is easy, but to give him your time is not always opportune.