Daily Inspiration Quote by Stella Adler

Adler is giving actors permission to break the spell of “good sense,” because good sense is often the enemy of aliveness. Onstage, the neat, reasonable choice can read as polite competence: technically correct, emotionally inert. Her provocation to “push it toward the illogical” isn’t an endorsement of randomness; it’s a method for escaping the deadening tyranny of plausibility and arriving at behavior that feels riskier, more human, and therefore more believable.

The line “We’re not scientists” is the dagger. It punctures a modern habit: treating emotion like a problem to solve, a motive to diagram, a character to psychoanalyze into coherence. Adler’s training pushed back against that kind of inward, clinical self-explanation. She wanted actors to feed on the world, on imagination, on big external circumstances - not just private wounds polished into “reasons.” In that context, the “illogical” becomes a practical tool. People contradict themselves, they choose the wrong words, they laugh at funerals, they stay in rooms they should leave. Drama lives in those fractures.

Subtextually, Adler is also defending artistry as its own intelligence. The imagination doesn’t move in straight lines; it leaps, detours, sabotages. When an actor allows an unreasonable impulse - a sudden tenderness, an inappropriate joke, an unexpected stillness - the audience stops watching a performance and starts watching a person. That’s her intent: to restore surprise, and with it, truth.