Top 106 Quotes & Sayings by Sidney Poitier - Page 2

My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that's my dad. And he was a very good man.

I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life.

An appreciable number of directors have shifted to lower-cost films, allowing them to be satisfied with a more modest return.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

The impact of the black audience is expressing itself. They look to films to be more expressive of their needs, their lives. Hollywood has gotten that message - finally.

I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.

If the screen does not make room for me in the structure of their screenplay, I'll step out. I'll step back. I'd step back. I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it.

I had to satisfy the action fans, the romantic fans, the intellectual fans. It was a terrific burden.

I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida. It was so blatant... I had never been so described as Florida described me.

I was a gift to my mother. She was a remarkable person. God or nature, or whatever those forces are, smiled on her, then passed me the best of her.

I"ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me.

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

I am the me I choose to be.

I've learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. There is a certain anger: it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal rage--self destructive, destroy the world rage--and its flame burns because the world is so unjust. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.

If you apologize because you are afraid, then you are a child not a man.

History passes the final judgment

When you walk with someone, something unspoken happens. Either you match their pace or they match yours.

I do know that I'm responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it.

As I've mentioned, a large part of my father's legacy is the lesson he taught his sons. He brought us together and said, 'The measure of a man is how well he provides for his children.

A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better.

I would like to grow less afraid of dying. I am infinitely less afraid today than I was 15 or 25 years ago. I was most afraid of dying when I was 33, because I come from a Catholic family.

But perhaps more important, as someone wishing to make a comment or two about contemporary life and values, I don't have to dig through libraries or travel to exotic lands to arrive at a view of our modern situation refracted through the lens of the preindustrial world, or the uncommercialized, unfranchised, perhaps unsanitized-and therefore supposedly more "authentic"-perspective ofthe Third World. Very simply, this is because that "other" world, as alien as if separated by centuries in time, is the one from which I came

Of all my father's teachings, the most enduring was the one about the true measure of a man. That true measure was how well he provided for his children, and it stuck with me as if it were etched in my brain.

I find myself, at this time in my life, no less challenged, no less plagued, no less intrigued by what I still don't know.

Every new fashion is a form of rebellion.

Marriage is no way of life for the weak, the selfish, or the insecure.

If I'm remembered for having done a few good things and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that's plenty.

You don't have to become something that you aren't to become better than you are.

I defend myself by improving myself.

I think the way I want to think. I live the way I want to live.

We suffer pain, we hang tight to hope, we nurture expectations, we are plagued occasionally by fears, we are haunted by defeats and unrealized hopes . . . The hoplessness of which I speak is not limited.

If the image one holds of one's self contains elements that don't square with reality, one is best advised to let go of them, however difficult that may be.

As I entered this world, I would leave behind the nurturing of my family and my home, but in another sense I would take their protection with me. The lessons I had learned, the feelings of groundedness and belonging that have been woven into my character there, would be my companions on the journey.

Acting isn't a game of "pretend." It's an exercise in being real.

Okay listen, you think I'm so inconsequential? Then try this on for size. All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value - to you I say, I'm not talking about being AS GOOD as you. I hereby declare myself BETTER than you.

Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.

You don't have to become something you're not to be better than you were.

We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.

True 'joy' is the difference between just amusing ourselves to death and creating 'meaningful' pleasure.

Living consciously involves being genuine; it involves listening and responding to others honestly and openly; it involves being in the moment.

If you are anxious about death, then you don't have a sense of the oneness of things - you feel that after death, you will be no more.

Racism is very painful. That's life. It never ends.

I have a kind of respect - a worshipful attitude, even - for nature and the natural order and the cosmos and the seasons.

Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.

I set my star so high that I would constantly be in motion toward it.

The older we get the less afraid we are.