Lupita Nyong'o Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

There is no shame in black beauty.

You have to allow for the impossible to be possible.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

As actors, you become an expert at starting over.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Human beings have an instinct for freedom.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

In the madness, you have to find calm.