Shirley MacLaine Quotes

You know, I have never had a casting couch proposition in my life. I thought there was something wrong with me.

Melt their weapons, melt their hearts, melt their anger with love.

If we can genuinely honor our mother and father we are not only at peace with ourselves but we can then give birth to our future.

In order to get to the fruit of the tree, you have to go out on a limb.

All you really need in life is some fresh water, a good hat, and a really good pair of shoes.

You know when you eat too many sweets and get diabetes? Paparazzi are the diabetes of materialistic culture.

Celebrate what is possible. Your beliefs will create your reality.

New York is the perfect town for getting over a disappointment, a loss, or a broken heart.

I simply channeled a character, this time I allowed the character to inhabit me.

New York was the only city I knew in the world where you could be desperately lonely at nine in the morning, crossing the street for a bagel at Gristede's, and find that seven hours later you were drinking Irish coffee at P.J. Clarke's with all the friends you had inherited along the way.

Dance is an art that imprints on the soul. It is with you every moment, it expresses itself in everything you do.

I think the world is in the mess it's in because we are spiritually ignorant.

I'd like to introduce someone who has just come into my life. I've admired him for 35 years. He's someone who represents integrity, honesty, art, and on top of that stuff I'm actually sleeping with him.

Women love working together. That's my experience anyway.

Being old is such a treat!

Someday perhaps change will occur when times are ready for it instead of always when it is too late. Someday change will be accepted as life itself.

For if the talent or individuality is there, it should be expressed. If it doesn't find its way out into the air, it can be turned inward and gnaw like the fox at the Spartan boy's belly.

We've had so many lifetimes of different cultures and different religions and different points of view and different wars and different loves and different children.

When a child comes in, I believe that it's a 'multipersonhood,' and it knows it, its consciousness knows it, and it has a nuclei in the center of its consciousness that is the repository of all experience and all knowledge. And when you look in the eyes of your baby and you feel this sense that they are an old soul, I believe indeed they are.

...One individual is his or her own best teacher, and no other idol or false image should be worshiped or adored because the God we are all seeking lies inside oneself, not outside.

I could be whatever I wanted to be if I trusted that music, that song, that vibration of God that was inside of me.

Until mankind realizes that there is, in truth, no good, and there is, in truth, no evil-there will be no peace.

I have to do two things at once or I get tired.

The uninvestigated life is not worth living. I don't want to live that way.

I don't need anyone to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves.

To release others from the expectations we have of them is to really love them.

I think male actors get confused by their own vanity.

Anything is possible if you believe you deserve it.

What we live with is ourselves. And when you have your own identity you are much easier to live with.

Then come the lights shining on you from above. You are a performer. You forget all you learned, the process of technique, the fear, the pain, you even forget who you are you become one with the music, the lights, indeed one with the dance.

I wasn't afraid of getting old, because I was never a great beauty.

Remember what people used to say about meditation? Now everyone is doing it.

Friendship is not linear. It moves in all directions, teaching us about ourselves and about each other.

Never trust a man when he's in love, drunk, or running for office.

All life is a boomerang. We receive what we give.

I thought playing an angel would be very good for my image.

When you look back... on your love affairs... what you really find out is that the only person you really go to bed with is yourself.

Fear is concealed in smiles and flashing teeth. 'Please say you still love me,' the kings and queens are really saying. And, when they fare badly, they return to their palaces and sleep fitfully.

When times are bad, people like to lose themselves in the sheer glamour of another period: beautiful wardrobes, magnificent meals served in elegant settings.

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.

In some ways, America has grown up to be a masterpiece of self-concern.

I was afraid I would get the Oscar for 'Irma La Douce' because it was popular. But I didn't want to because I didn't really think it was that good.

I'm an expert in hookers. I'm an expert in doormats. I'm an expert in victims. They were the best parts. And when I woke up--sociologically, politically, and creatively--I could no longer take those parts and look in the mirror.

You can't lie when you dance. It's so direct. You do what is in you. It is impossible to dance out of the side of your mouth.

I think we have to do something about the environment and how we are polluting the planet.

Someday change will be accepted as life itself.

Nothing should be permanent except struggle with the dark side within ourselves.

Perhaps the longest journey is the journey within.