Meryl Streep Quotes

The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.

Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple - love, sex and food!

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

What makes you different or weird, that's your strength.

I think that you find your own way. You have your own rules. You have your own understanding of yourself, and that's what you're going to count on. In the end, it's what feels right to you. Not what your mother told you. Not what some actress told you. Not what anybody else told you but the still, small voice.

The minute you start caring about what other people think, is the minute you stop being yourself.

It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.

It's amazing what you can get if you quietly, clearly and authoritatively demand it.

You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious, and when you've lost a lot of people, you realize each day is a gift.

I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.

Everything we say signifies; everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time.

That is the simple secret. Always take your heart to work.

As there begins to be less time ahead of you, you want to be exactly who you are, without making it easier for everyone else.

Pretending is a very valuable life skill.

You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.

You don't have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you.

We need art as much as we need good works. You need it like food. You need it for inspiration to keep going on the days that your low. We need each other in that way.

Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too.

Put blinders on to those things that conspire to hold you back, especially the ones in your own head.

I love acting, of course, but being with my husband and my children always brought me the greatest joy and happiness in life.

Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow.

You just have to keep on doing what you do. It's the lesson I get from my husband; he just says, Keep going. Start by starting.

My advice: Don't waste so much time worrying about your skin or your weight. Develop what you do, what you put your hands on in the world.

True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.

The work itself is the reward, and if I choose challenging work, it'll pay me back with interest. At least I'll be interested, even if nobody else is.

I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities.

People will say to me, ‘You’ve played so many strong women,’ and I’ll say, ‘Have you ever said to a man, “You’ve played so many strong men?”’ No! Because the expectation is [men] are varied. Why can’t we have that expectation about women?

Being a celebrity has taught me to hide but being an actor has opened my soul.

The best thing about acting is when you're playing a scene and you actually become your character and lose yourself in that moment. That's when you know you've been succeeded at what you've worked very hard to accomplish in your profession. Those are the truly thrilling moments.

One of the most important keys to acting is curiosity. I am curious to the point of being nosy. What that means is you want to devour lives. You're eager to put on their shoes and wear their clothes and have them become a part of you. All people contain mystery, and when you act, you want to plumb that mystery until everything is known to you.

Listening is everything. Listening is the whole deal. That's what I think. And I mean that in terms of before you work, after you work, in between work, with your children, with your husband, with your friends, with your mother, with your father. It's everything. And it's where you learn everything.

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.

I never give any character I play less respect than I give my own life.

All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.

I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

I'm in show business. I believe in illusion and delusions and in holding aloft the bubble of a dream of some sort because, really, there are lots of reasons to look at the chasm. But art and music, these ineffables, they're just - they're the consolations of what human beings can create and make, and delight is accessible, you know, should you care to find it.

Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.

When they called my name, I had this feeling I could hear half of America going, 'Oh no. Come on... Her, again?' You know. But, whatever.

Fear focuses the mind.

My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.

My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that.

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

If you make the tough decisions, people will hate you today. But they will thank you for generations.

Some people are filled by compassion and a desire to do good, and some simply don't think anything's going to make a difference.

I think that we pay much more attention to fashion and our hair, skin and foreheads, our abdominal muscles and shoes than what is happening in the world. We willingly take that 'drug' and go along with that.

I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.

I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work.

What's worse than brutality that dehumanizes women? Tolerance and indifference towards it.

I just take every day is a miracle and I'm really glad that I'm still working and that people are not sick of me, even though even I'm sick of me a little bit.

There is some liberation in the freedom of being totally alone and really going for it.