Lupita Nyong'o Quotes

There is no shame in black beauty.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Happiness is the most important thing.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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

You have to allow for the impossible to be possible.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

As actors, you become an expert at starting over.

I've always had an involved imagination.

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

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.

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

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

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 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 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 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.