Shirley MacLaine Quotes

I'm a peaceful person once work ethic is established. If people are around me and whatever I'm doing is efficient, then I'm extremely peaceful.

I mean, I'm just speaking of my own experiences and my own desires, and it's a kind of a childlike wonder that could really possibly speculate on other dimensions.

The secret is to let the audience feel through the actress, rather than having the actress feel for the audience. When you can do that, you involved the audience almost without their knowledge or awareness.

I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I've written for myself, and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part.

Prayer is speaking to God. Meditation is listening to God. Trust tranquility.

I had a video made of my recent knee operation. The doctor said it was the best movie I ever starred in.

I don't feel competitive.

Why do people have to love people anyway?

One can become as intellectually arrogant about spirituality as about empirical science.

I can't give up my own identity.

Art is about energy positive and negative. All art has the power to heal because it helps us see who we are, and what we resist.

People think I'm nuts.

To dance at all is to confront oneself. It is the art of honesty.

A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never ceased to be amused.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

You think you have a handle on God, the Universe, and the Great White Light until you go home for Thanksgiving. In an hour, you realize how far you've got to go and who is the real turkey.

You are the architect of your personal experience.

Crystals amplify the consciousness.

I make my mistakes in public.

I think when I was in my early twenties and middle twenties I didn't even know I wasn't living up to my potential. A couple of friends told me I wasn't and told me to get my act together, and it made a huge impact on me.

I believe in UFOs, I believe in extraterrestrials, and I believe in angels. And maybe they'll protect all of us.

I have a lot of friends who are around. I'm having a wonderful time in my life now with my platonic relationships with men and women, because when that sexual tension is off the requirement of the interplay, then you get to who the people really are, and to yourself.

Once you get your own family clear in your head, whatever your problems are with it. You're better prepared for being an adult in the world.

My gift is that I'm not beautiful. My career was never about looks. It's about health and being in good shape.

Audrey was the kind of person who when she saw someone else suffering tried to take their pain on herself. She was a healer. She knew how to love. You didn't have to be in constant contact with her to feel you had a friend. We always picked up right where we left off.

Don't be afraid to go out on a limb. It's where all the fruit is.

There's no journey worth taking except the journey through one's self. That's the most important journey you take. I found that out as I went around the world many times: I was learning about me.

I'm not unaware of how I'm perceived, I just don't care about it. Unless I really hurt someone's feelings. I care about that.

We feel the urge to tell the truth as we see it. But we should try to accomplish this without judgemental condemnations that hurt others. Again, when we remember that what we perceive in another is a reflection of ourselves, we become less judgemental. So when we freely express harsh judgement of another, we are in effect talking about those aspects of ourselves that trouble us the most.

I'm not one for wardrobe.

I do miss the stage. There's nothing like it, nothing. When I did my one-woman show and played the Palace and played the Gershwin and all that, I did - what? - eight shows or maybe more a week. Of course you can't do anything else, and you can't run quickly for a cab in the rain, and you can't have a drunken love affair. You can't do any of that. Because you've got to be perfectly healthy. And I guess I value enjoying my life a little bit more than the discipline these days.

You can't take a crash course in serenity.

I want women to be liberated and still be able to have a nice ass and shake it.

... when things get rough, a breakthrough is just on the other side of the pain.

Of course I'm schooled in the old school method: taking what I think the director wants, then reworking it through my own brain and heart.

I think it's much more important to know the truth than it is to make money on it.

I'm not sure I'll come back to this planet. I may come back to another one.

bonding through dependence never works, whereas bonding through freedom always does.

I don't think you go out of style when you're living in the present most of the time. And I think that is what I do.

I think in the end we all know that our best friend is ourselves. We are born alone and we die alone. That's the journey.

The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.

Sometimes I feel an impingement of something I went through in another lifetime. But I like to concentrate on the absolute present. That's why I love my animals. They live in the present.

Sometimes people who have their lives played out in public don't feel they have the privacy to continually journey within. I did, and that's why I have longevity.

The mob taught me how to play gin rummy.

I've made so many movies playing a hooker that they don't pay me in the regular way anymore. They leave it on the dresser.

We cannot divorce what we are producing from what we are. We create technology out of the vision we have of ourselves. If we are blind in our conception of ourselves we will create a blind technology.

I don't know why anybody would be in awe of me.

The more sex becomes a non-issue in people's lives, the happier they are.