Meryl Streep quotes: her take on happiness, success, finding freedom, living your best life, and more.
“That is the simple secret. Always take your heart to work. Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life.”
“Put blinders on to those things that conspire to hold you back, especially the ones in your own head.”
“My advice: develop what you do, what you put your hands on in the world.”
“Often, success in one area precludes succeeding in the other.”
“Fear is a good thing. Fear is your friend. Everything that destabilizes you can help you. If you’re comfortable, you’re not doing your job.”
“Fear focuses the mind.”
“What gives you strength is also your weakness – your raging insecurity.”
“It’s good to push yourself and do what you don’t necessarily want to do, that if you’re not automatically good at it, you should try it. Trying is so important.”
“Obsession is an attractive thing.”
“The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What makes you different or weird, that’s your strength.”
“The minute you start caring about what other people think, is the minute you stop being yourself.”
“It’s amazing what you can get if you quietly, clearly and authoritatively demand it.”
“You have to have a lot of stamina. And you have to have very good organizational skills. I feel like I run a business although I haven’t one. It’s planning, planning, and planning.”
“Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow.”
“Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time.”
“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.'”
“This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.”
“We are the choices we have made.”
“True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.”
“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.”
“If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty-bound to spread around like manure. Fertilize those young minds!”
“I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.”
“The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.”
“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.”
“It’s so much easier to be happy. It’s so much easier to choose to love the things that you have, instead of always yearning for what you’re missing, or what it is that you’re imagining you’re missing. It is so much more peaceful.”
“I grew up in small towns, I worked for a living, I lived for a while in a commune in Vermont where nobody had any money and nobody knew whose things were whose.”
“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.”
“Being an actor lets me be a million different things.”
“Show business has been really, really good to me because I can work and take a lot of time off, and I’m an extremely undisciplined person.”
“I never look a gift horse in the mouth. And I’ve been really, really lucky. I’m aware of that. And my career has been given to me by the people I’ve worked with, no question. The actors, the directors, the cinematographers, the writers, all of whom gave me the opportunity to work in the way that I have and I’m really grateful.”
“Now I’m simply amazed that I’ve been able to find so much work and play many different kinds of characters at an age when this industry tends to forget about women. I’m thrilled!”
“You make me proud to be an artist. You make me feel that what I have in me, my body, my face, my age, is enough. If you ask me as an artist what I came into this world to do, I, an artist, would say, I came to live out loud.”
“I just see what’s there in me that I can apply to the task at hand an instinctually apply those elements. And I know the things that trigger good work.”
“I like the routine of working, of going in every morning and, ‘Hi! Hi!’ and coffee and everything.”
“I get nervous the more time I have to think about something so I deliberately don’t give myself too much time between jobs. I take a big break and then I start working again usually.”
“But I’m doing the only thing I can, I think.”
“I love acting, of course, but being with my husband and my children always brought me the greatest joy and happiness in life.”
“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.”
“Life is all about making choices and I’m very happy with mine. I have had a wonderful time raising four children and I’ve also been lucky to have the support of a wonderful husband.”
“There are some days when I, myself, think I’m overrated… but not today.”
“Being a celebrity has taught me to hide but being an actor has opened my soul.”
“You don’t have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you.”
“I have a very good life – I’m lucky enough not to be deprived.”
“I want to feel my life while I’m in it.”
“Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple: love, sex, and food! Everything else – power, influence, strength – all those things can overpower what’s important in life. But as long as you have food and shelter over your head, if the necessities are taken care of, what makes us happy on top of that is very simple.”
See Julia Roberts quotes next.
