Lupita Nyong'o famous quotes

No matter where you're from, your dreams are valid.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Inspirational #Motivational #Suicide

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Beautiful #Heart #Compassion

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Self #Impossible #Good Enough

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

#I've Learned #Good Enough #Enough

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

#Badass #Women #Risk

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Overcoming #Saboteurs #Obstacles

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

#I Realized #Acquire

What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion: for yourself and for those around you.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Beautiful #Compassion #Compassion For Yourself

You have to allow for the impossible to be possible.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Impossible

Your value is in yourself; the other stuff will come and go.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Stuff #Comes And Goes #Values

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

#World #Want #Rooms

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

#Pain #Joy #Feelings

There is no shame in black beauty.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Black #Shame #Black Beauty

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Beautiful #Keys #Light

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Mother #Compassion #Supportive

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Mother #Teacher #Jobs

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Beautiful #Validation #Shade

To be human is to seek perfection, and find joy in never attaining it.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Perfection #Joy

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Play #Risk #Safe

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

#Dream #People #Born

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

#Beautiful #Makeup #Skins

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

#Artist #Honest #Being An Artist

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Real #Men #Thinking

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#War #Fighting #Past

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Life #Thank You #Thankful

[My mother] always said I was beautiful and I finally believed her at some point.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Inspiring #Beautiful #Mom

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Winning #People #Justice

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

#Makeup #Trying #Different

I like to wear things, I don't like things to wear me.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#

You can’t eat beauty. It doesn’t feed you.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Compassion For Yourself

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

#Prayer #Miracle #Wake Up

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Successful #College #Kenya

As actors, you become an expert at starting over.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Starting Over #Experts #Actors

Human beings have an instinct for freedom.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Instinct #Humans #Human Beings

In the madness, you have to find calm.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Calm #Madness

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

#Understanding #Circumstances #Understanding Yourself

I dress according to how I feel.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Dresses #Feels

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Jeans #Focus #Missing

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Wish #May #Want

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Role Models #Understanding #Roles

I think beauty is an expression of love.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Thinking #Expression #Expressions Of Love

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Order #Games #Knowing

With success comes more responsibility, a larger size of existence, which is uncomfortable.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Responsibility #Size #Existence

Happiness is the most important thing.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Important #Important Things

I like people who don't tell you what you want to hear.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#People #Want #What You Want

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Cousin #Sibling #Believe

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Brother #Confused #Thinking

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Growing Up #People #Kenya

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

#People #Connections #Able

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
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Regret #Age #Actors

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#People #Want #Opinion

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#War #Two #Voice

We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Capacity #Cruelty #Extremes

Beautiful people have many advantages, but so do friendly people.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Beautiful #People #Friendly

Makeup isn't something I've worn a lot of in my life.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Makeup #Worn

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Dream #School #Roles

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Dream #Actors #Wanted

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Integrity #Character #Play

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Dark #Hair #Tvs

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

#Acting #Roles #Newness

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Dream #Healthy #Common

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

#Ostriches #Sand #Feels

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

#Actors #Reason #New Things

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?
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Girl #School #Makeup

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Fun #Different Experiences #People

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Jesus #Heart #Dancing

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Cutting #Week #Enough

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Trying #Flight #Importance

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Cousin #Children #Niece

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Silly #Break Out #Ridiculous

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Mother #Real #Responsibility

I've always had an involved imagination.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Imagination #Involved

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

#Fun #Parent #Way

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Careers #Stories #Want

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Actors #Kind #Speak

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Supportive #Wish #Actors

What's becoming very obvious to me is that fashion is art.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Fashion #Art #Becoming

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Sweet #Drama #Actors

I'm pretty awesome at making salad dressings.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Salad Dressing #Salad #Dressings

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Needs #Way #Theater

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Color #Purple #People

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Drama #School #Years

To this day, I love eating steak tacos before going to the red carpets.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Red #Tacos #Eating

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Thinking #Genius #Used

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Opportunity #Black #Way

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.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Drama #School #Phones

I went to the Independent Spirit Awards and won.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Independent #Awards #Spirit

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. Beautiful people have many advantages, but so do friendly people.... I think beauty is an expression of love.
-- Lupita Nyong'o

#Beautiful #Mother #Thinking

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

#Hustle And Bustle #Kenya #Grew Up