Shirley Maclaine Quotes

The more I've learned about me, the more I'm interested in others.

People think I'm nuts.

I look like a real bag lady when I go to Starbucks with my dog and get my chai.

My mother was Canadian, so you never knew what she was thinking.

The soul is everlasting, and its learning experience is lifetime after lifetime.

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

Things are done according to money these days.

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

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

Anything is possible if you believe you deserve it.

Bonding through dependence never works, whereas bonding through freedom always does.

Acupuncturists
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The secret is to let the audience feel through the actress, rather than having the actress feel for the audience. When you can do that, you involved the audience almost without their knowledge or awareness.

I can be a lazy slob.

I had a video made of my recent knee operation. The doctor said it was the best movie I ever starred in.

I don't like to socialise much.

I watched my head rolling on the floor. It landed face up and a big tear came out of one eye.

I live in too many cities.

Hollywood always had a streak of the totalitarian in just about everything it did. The old moguls were essentially hard-fisted authoritarians who had created a system of linked dictatorships to control the creative people. We were supposed to be the children; mad, tempestuous, brilliant, talented, not terribly smart children.

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

It's useless to hold a person to anything he says wile he's in love, drunk, or running for office.

I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I've written for myself, and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part.

I think it's much more important to know the truth than it is to make money on it.

We humans should never forget our capacity to connect with the collective spirit of animals. Their energy is essential to our future growth.

I loved the idea of doing a love story with people over the age of 60 and a film that will hopefully give so many of the audience a chance to see themselves on the screen.

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

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

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.

You have to be talentedly insecure in order to be a good actress. And then it's the director's job to make you more miserable and get a good take.

I don't feel competitive.

There are stars who are proficiently paranoid enough to hide what they really think. I can't.

Prayer is speaking to God. Meditation is listening to God. Trust tranquility.

The pickings are pretty slim when you have to play the part of a housewife who doesn't go out of her apartment because she's afraid she's going to get mugged, or a woman who turns into her brother, who is a murderer.

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.

Technology has outstripped our knowledge of self.

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 makes strangers of people who would be friends.

My first few weeks in New York were an initiation into the kingdom of guts.

There's no journey worth taking except the journey through one's self. That's the most important journey you take. I found that out as I went around the world many times: I was learning about me.

I'm a peaceful person once work ethic is established.

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

I realized that if what we call human nature can be changed, then absolutely anything is possible. From that moment my life changed.

And I think we'll be able to prove scientifically that other talents such as intuitive, psychic, clairvoyant and audiovoyant are very real.

To dance at all is to confront oneself. It is the art of honesty.

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

I don't have an assistant. I make a lot of people around me my slaves, but no assistant.

I love the idea that I'm the oldest one in the room because I can get away with anything!

One can become as intellectually arrogant about spirituality as about empirical science.

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

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

One of the most erogenous zones of a woman is her intelligence.

On things she had to pack before leaving her home in advance of a forest fire, 1996. Childhood pictures and pictures of my life. Do you know how many pictures that is? Not just this life; I have pictures from 13,000 lives.

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

I've always thought I was looking for myself whenever I traveled. Like a journey anywhere was really a journey through myself.

He's a real gentleman. I bet he takes the dishes out of the sink before he pees in it.

The illusion never really dissipates that you can lose twenty pounds in one night by cutting out dinner.

Sometimes I feel an impingement of something I went through in another lifetime. But I like to concentrate on the absolute present. That's why I love my animals. They live in the present.

He [Jimmy Carter] says his lust is in his heart. I hope it's a little lower.

Some people think I look like a sweet potato, I consider myself a spud with a heart of gold.

Release and resolve fear, and what you want flows freely.

I have a lot of friends who are around. I'm having a wonderful time in my life now with my platonic relationships with men and women, because when that sexual tension is off the requirement of the interplay, then you get to who the people really are, and to yourself.

Films and life are like clay, waiting for us to mold it. And when you trust your own insides and that becomes achievement, it's a kind of principle that seems to me is at work with everyone. God bless that principle. God bless that potential that we all have for making anything possible if we think we deserve it.

Being old is such a treat!

When you walk 10 hours, 11 hours a day by yourself, you are doing a walking meditation.

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.

Well, when you're relaxed, your mind takes you to the whole reality. There's no such thing as time when you're really relaxed. That's why meditation works.

I don't do like diva trips and stuff.

I never would have given up my work to stay home.

I believe we have neglected to see that terrorism is just a convenient excuse for those in power to gently instruct us to go quietly into that good night of being compliant and unrevolutionary citizens who willingly become subjugated to authority.

Sometimes people who have their lives played out in public don't feel they have the privacy to continually journey within. I did, and that's why I have longevity.

I've gotten crankier in my old age.

I don't like leaving my dog when I go to England and she is with me all the time.

I mean, I'm just speaking of my own experiences and my own desires, and it's a kind of a childlike wonder that could really possibly speculate on other dimensions.

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

The mob taught me how to play gin rummy.

If anything interferes with my inner peace, I will walk away. Arguments with family members. All that stuff. None of it matters.

I don't know why anybody would be in awe of me.

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

I've been through so much of my own self-search that I'm not as consumed with who I am as I used to be.

Listen to sounds beyond silence.

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.

On the stage you try to act real. On the screen you try to be real.

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

I mean, no one asks beauty secrets of me, or 'What size do you wear?' or 'Who's your couturier?' They ask me about really deep things and I love that.

Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.

Pain was nothing but resistance; resistance to the God energy caused by fear. Without fear and resistance, death would simply be a transition to another dimension.

Why do people have to love people anyway?

I'm not one for wardrobe.

I want women to be liberated and still be able to have a nice ass and shake it.

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

You think you have a handle on God, the Universe, and the Great White Light until you go home for Thanksgiving. In an hour, you realize how far you've got to go and who is the real turkey.

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

I was always a character actress and never a sex symbol. Even when I was the leading lady, I was a character actor.

I think people will become more and more aware that we are all more than we seem.

The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.

Remember, I come from such an excessively overdone, red-carpet place called Hollywood. So I'm used to people blowing up their success in ways that are far above and beyond the truth.

I do miss the stage. There's nothing like it, nothing. When I did my one-woman show and played the Palace and played the Gershwin and all that, I did - what? - eight shows or maybe more a week. Of course you can't do anything else, and you can't run quickly for a cab in the rain, and you can't have a drunken love affair. You can't do any of that. Because you've got to be perfectly healthy. And I guess I value enjoying my life a little bit more than the discipline these days.

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

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.

I don't think you go out of style when you're living in the present most of the time. And I think that is what I do.