Lupita Nyong'o
No matter where you're from, your dreams are valid.Collection: Inspirational
What I've learned from myself is that I don't have to be anybody else. Myself is good enough.Collection: I've Learned
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Beautiful
You fail, and then what? Life goes on. It's only when you risk failure that you discover things.Collection: Badass
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.Collection: Overcoming
You have to allow for the impossible to be possible.Collection: Impossible
What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion: for yourself and for those around you.Collection: Beautiful
I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.Collection: I Realized
Your value is in yourself; the other stuff will come and go.Collection: Stuff
We don't get to pick the genes we want. There's room in this world for beauty to be diverse.Collection: World
There is no shame in black beauty.Collection: Black
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Mother
I feel privileged that people are looking up to me and perhaps a dream will be born because of my presence.Collection: Dream
To be human is to seek perfection, and find joy in never attaining it.Collection: Perfection
With success comes more responsibility, a larger size of existence, which is uncomfortable.Collection: Responsibility
Part of being an artist is that you are always concerned you don't have what it takes. It keeps us honest.Collection: Artist
I've worked hard to feel beautiful in my natural skin. Personally, I don't ever want to depend on makeup to feel beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Winning
[My mother] always said I was beautiful and I finally believed her at some point.Collection: Inspiring
I love color. I'm enjoying trying all different shades. Makeup isn't something I've worn a lot of in my life.Collection: Makeup
You can’t eat beauty. It doesn’t feed you.Collection: Compassion For Yourself
And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned.Collection: Prayer
It's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.Collection: Understanding
I dress according to how I feel.Collection: Dresses
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.Collection: Growing Up
I've had somebody say, "I want you at my wedding, but I don't want you to pull focus, so wear jeans!" Losing my anonymity is something that's proving to be very challenging.... It's good for your soul to walk around unnoticed; there's so much you can't do when everybody knows who you are. And I so miss those little things.Collection: Jeans
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Role Models
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.Collection: Wish
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.Collection: War
I think beauty is an expression of love.Collection: Thinking
The game of chess is a metaphor for life... it teaches you strategy and it teaches you the value of knowing where you are, where you want to get to and what obstacles are in the way that you need to navigate in order to get there.Collection: Order
Happiness is the most important thing.Collection: Important
I like people who don't tell you what you want to hear.Collection: People
I was bullied by my siblings and cousins, so make-believe was a way in which I could be in charge. When I was like 10 and my sister was about five, I convinced her that she was going to jail because she used a bad word. The doorbell happened to ring, and I told her it was the police. I made her pack her bags. She was crying, and then I said to her, "I forgive you, and I'm gonna tell the cop to go away." Then, of course, she loved me. It was terrible - she still remembers it. I had a sordid sense of humor.Collection: Cousin
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.Collection: Brother
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 actorCollection: Regret
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.Collection: People
Beautiful people have many advantages, but so do friendly people.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Jesus