Lupita nyong'o Inspirational Quotes

And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned.

I like to wear things, I don't like things to wear me.

The game of chess is a metaphor for life... it teaches you strategy and it teaches you the value of knowing where you are, where you want to get to and what obstacles are in the way that you need to navigate in order to get there.

Being called gorgeous is not a bad thing! But at the same time, I don’t want to thrive on people’s opinions of me.

There's always a sense of newness with acting, because every role, you come to every role fresh.

Every time I overcome an obstacle, it feels like success. Sometimes the biggest ones are in our head - the saboteurs that tell us we can't.

I went to the Independent Spirit Awards and won.

I loved duping my parents; I liked manipulating them. It was a way for me to stand out. It was fun.

What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion: for yourself and for those around you.

We don't get to pick the genes we want. There's room in this world for beauty to be diverse.

As actors, you become an expert at starting over.

Even in my dreams of being an actor, my dream was not in the celebrity. My dream was in the work that I wanted to do.

I've always had an involved imagination.

I can speak of actors that I love. I love Cate Blanchett, Viola Davis, her tenacity. I love Charlize Theron. She's so surprising and so exhilarating, the kinds of projects she takes on. Marion Cotillard as well.

I feel privileged that people are looking up to me and perhaps a dream will be born because of my presence.

It's only when you risk failure that you discover things. When you play it safe, you're not expressing the utmost of your human experience.

I think it's a real gift to be faced with man's potential for extreme cruelty but also man's resilience and the fact that love really does conquer everything. It's the only answer to these kinds of atrocities and it's not a passive thing.

To this day, I love eating steak tacos before going to the red carpets.

What I've learned from myself is that I don't have to be anybody else. Myself is good enough.

I remember in my very first fitting, costume designer Patricia Norris gave me a garment with these intricate stitches - stitches over stitches, because it had been repaired so many times. Once I put it on, she told me that it belonged to an actual slave woman. My heart just stopped. Each one of the stitches had a story, you know. Just recognizing this period I was going to be dancing with was a "come to Jesus" moment.

I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.

My immediate family was always very supportive. It was my own fear of the rest of the world not accepting me, the rest of our society not accepting my wish to be an actor.

I was bullied by my siblings and cousins, so make-believe was a way in which I could be in charge. When I was like 10 and my sister was about five, I convinced her that she was going to jail because she used a bad word. The doorbell happened to ring, and I told her it was the police. I made her pack her bags. She was crying, and then I said to her, "I forgive you, and I'm gonna tell the cop to go away." Then, of course, she loved me. It was terrible - she still remembers it. I had a sordid sense of humor.

I've worked hard to feel beautiful in my natural skin. Personally, I don't ever want to depend on makeup to feel beautiful.

What I will say is that what I have learned for myself is that I don’t have to be anybody else; and that myself is good enough; and that when I am being true to that self, then I can avail myself to extraordinary thingsYou have to allow for the impossible to be possible.

Whoopi Goldberg looked like me, she had hair like mine, she was dark like me. I'd been starved for images of myself. I'd grown up watching a lot of American TV.

I come from a loving, supportive family, and my mother taught me that there are more valuable ways to achieve beauty than just through your external features. She was focused on compassion and respect, and those are the things that ended up translating to me as beauty.

I think beauty is an expression of love.

I do my best work when I feel conviction to say something through the character I play. Always I want to have integrity and not compromise that.

I haven't yet figured out how to be a celebrity; that's something I'm learning, and I wish there were a course on how to handle it. I have to be aware that my kinesphere may be larger than I want it to be.

You fail, and then what? Life goes on. It's only when you risk failure that you discover things.

I definitely intend to create my own work in the future so that we don't have to keep saying we don't have work for black women. But right now I don't know what's next. I hope that there are more opportunities to come my way.

I'm pretty awesome at making salad dressings.

It's great to have something to dress up for. You know, I spent three years in slacks at drama school, so now I like putting a dress on.

The first time I cut all my hair off was when I was 19. I just got fed up going to the salon every week. I'd had enough! On a whim, it was off. It's low-maintenance.

I dress according to how I feel.

I used to enjoy doing silly walks on the street with my friends. Like, you know, you're walking, and then you break out in something completely ridiculous, to kind of spook out the person walking by you. I can't really do that anymore.

I don't think I will ever be able to really articulate how bizarre it was to hear my name at the Academy Awards. I'd watched in my pajamas the year before! I felt numb - dazed and confused. I remember feeling light - weightless. More like limbo than cloud nine. At first I was like, This is my statue; nobody gets to touch it. And by midnight I was like, Please, someone, take this statue; it's too heavy! So I gave it to my brother, and he went off with it.

Part of being an artist is that you are always concerned you don't have what it takes. It keeps us honest.

It's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

European standards of beauty are something that plague the entire world - the idea that darker skin is not beautiful, that light skin is the key to success and love. Africa is no exception.

You can’t eat beauty. It doesn’t feed you.

Oprah played a big role in my understanding of what it meant to be female and to really step into your own power. I wouldn't even call her a role model; she was literally a reference point. You have the dictionary, you have the Bible, you have Oprah.

I always love to learn new things. That's the reason I like being an actor.

Everyone said, ‘Brace yourself, Lupita! Keep a granola bar in that clutch of yours!’ I didn’t really understand what they meant, and it was only once it was past that I realized that my body had been holding on by a thread to get through this very intense experience. Nothing can prepare you for awards season. The red carpet feels like a war zone, except you cannot fly or fight; you just have to stand there and take it.

I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it.

To be human is to seek perfection, and find joy in never attaining it.

Happiness is the most important thing.

No matter where you're from, your dreams are valid.

Drama is my sweet spot, but the thing about being an actor is that you want to do a variety of things. I definitely love fantasy and would want to be in a fantasy project.

As human beings, what makes us able to empathize with people is a connection that is not necessarily understood mentally.

You have to allow for the impossible to be possible.

It's so much more fun to do the work than to talk about it. I will have to admit that. Everybody gets to decide how they feel, and what to take away by themselves, and that's what you hope for. That people will take away different things and have different experiences from the work we do as actors. So I don't like to prescribe how to feel about the work I do.

On a very practical level, I've learned the importance of circulation socks for planes. I had this awful experience of getting off a flight to go to an event and my feet had swelled. Try getting into heels then! So you put on the socks for the flight, then you can wear whatever heels you want.

I went to an all-boys high school, and they accepted girls in only the two A.P. classes. They had these archaic rules: for example, girls couldn't wear makeup. I found it so outrageous that an all-boys school could tell girls to not wear makeup! So I went on a campaign. I got a petition signed and everything. If a girl wants to wear makeup to boost confidence, why not?

I grew up in Nairobi, which is the capital of Kenya, so it's hustle and bustle, and there's always something going on.

That you will feel the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside. There is no shade in that beauty.

I have a very ostrich mentality. I feel like I have my head in the sand so no one can see me.

You win an Oscar, and immediately people ask how you feel. So you don't have time to actually feel anything because you have to generate a response. And then some of the feelings you have are so intimate and visceral, words don't really do them justice.

Steve McQueen is a genius. And I think that word is overused, but I think with Steve it's rightly used. He's a genius.

When I was younger, I was almost too afraid to admit that I wanted to be an actor. I didn't know any successful actors in Kenya, so I felt like I could get away with going to college to study film more easily than I could with saying, 'I want to be an actor.' That's what I did.

As human beings, it is our nature to dream about the future, but there is no future without a healthy nature. It's the common denominator that we all depend on, not just to live but to be happy. That's why we owe it to each other to make sure nature stays healthy.

I love color. I'm enjoying trying all different shades. Makeup isn't something I've worn a lot of in my life.

What's becoming very obvious to me is that fashion is art.

With success comes more responsibility, a larger size of existence, which is uncomfortable.

Beautiful people have many advantages, but so do friendly people.

Human beings have an instinct for freedom.

I've had somebody say, "I want you at my wedding, but I don't want you to pull focus, so wear jeans!" Losing my anonymity is something that's proving to be very challenging.... It's good for your soul to walk around unnoticed; there's so much you can't do when everybody knows who you are. And I so miss those little things.

I had this vivid image of myself at the age of 60 looking back on my life and truly regretting the fact that I hadn't tried to be an actor

Your value is in yourself; the other stuff will come and go.

I've always had that going on: "I can't," and then I do, so the voice says, "Well, that was an exception!" It's a tug-of-war between two voices: the one who knows she can and the one who's scared she can't.

There is no shame in black beauty.

The muscles you flex in theater are muscles that you really need. I must always find a way to get back there. It's irreplaceable.

I like people who don't tell you what you want to hear.

[My mother] always said I was beautiful and I finally believed her at some point.

It doesn't escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else's.

I never, in my wildest dreams, could I have thought that the first role I get out of school would lead to an Oscar nomination.

When I was in the second grade, one of my teachers said, "Where are you going to find a husband? How are you going to find someone darker than you?" I was mortified. I remember seeing a commercial where a woman goes for an interview and doesn't get the job. Then she puts a cream on her face to lighten her skin, and she gets the job! This is the message: that dark skin is unacceptable. I definitely wasn't hearing this from my immediate family - my mother never said anything to that effect - but the voices from the television are usually much louder than the voices of your parents.

Growing up in Kenya, slum life was not far away. I had family that lived in slums, so I visited them often, and so I've seen and interacted with abject poverty. But I also know that because of that, poverty is not the definition of the people that live there.

I grew up watching foreign programs - American, English, Mexican, and very little Kenyan. 'The Color Purple' was the first time I saw people who looked like me.

I have always loved children. I've been fantasizing about motherhood since I was probably 2 ½. I loved to babysit my cousins, and nieces, you know.

You can't eat beauty, it doesn't sustain you. What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion, for yourself and those around you. That kind of beauty inflamed the heart and merchants the soul.

We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty.

In the madness, you have to find calm.

I would love to have a career that's governed by the material; I always want to be part of stories that I feel are worthwhile.

I'm interested in generating work for myself. I have trouble with this waiting-for-the-phone-to-ring lifestyle, especially after drama school, which was so creatively fulfilling.

I feel a responsibility to myself and my parents and the people whose love has gotten me this far - people who were in my life before fame. That's where I get my sense of self. It's deadly for anyone to take on that role of a deity; it's not sustainable. I've got tons of flaws. Call my mother - she'll tell you! She keeps it real. Sometimes you don't want to hear the truth; she'll tell it to you out of love.

Makeup isn't something I've worn a lot of in my life.