Shirley Maclaine Quotes & Sayings

#1. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

#2. Fear is concealed in smiles and flashing teeth. 'Please say you still love me,' the kings and queens are really saying. And, when they fare badly, they return to their palaces and sleep fitfully.

Shirley Maclaine

#3. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

#4. Maybe I'm a dream artist, as they call it.

Shirley Maclaine

#5. Perhaps the longest journey is the journey within.

Shirley Maclaine

#6. I think when I was in my early twenties and middle twenties I didn't even know I wasn't living up to my potential. A couple of friends told me I wasn't and told me to get my act together, and it made a huge impact on me.

Shirley Maclaine

#7. Being a dancer meant you nearly always thought about food.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#9. I've gotten crankier in my old age.

Shirley Maclaine

#10. The comedy of class, played so straight, is a wonderful thing for an actor to sink their teeth into.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#12. It's a big deal for me to say I'm over politics.

Shirley Maclaine

#13. Technology has outstripped our knowledge of self.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#15. Why do people have to love people anyway?

Shirley Maclaine

#16. I'd like to introduce someone who has just come into my life. I've admired him for 35 years. He's someone who represents integrity, honesty, art, and on top of that stuff I'm actually sleeping with him.

Shirley Maclaine

#17. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

#18. Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#21. I can't advise any of the young ones, because I don't know what their background was, but I would suggest that anyone who wants to be famous more than anything - there's a real problem.

Shirley Maclaine

#22. I don't feel competitive.

Shirley Maclaine

#23. Listen to sounds beyond silence.

Shirley Maclaine

#24. I'm an artist, therefore I think I am sensitive to human pain.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#27. We cannot divorce what we are producing from what we are. We create technology out of the vision we have of ourselves. If we are blind in our conception of ourselves we will create a blind technology.

Shirley Maclaine

#28. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

#29. I think the hill one has to trudge in order to understand a man's baggage is more of a trek than I'd like to take right now.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#31. New York is the perfect town for getting over a disappointment, a loss, or a broken heart.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#33. Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#38. Crystals amplify the consciousness.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#40. You let the energy go wherever it wants. I have such a rich spiritual life. Most people take drugs to experience that.

Shirley Maclaine

#41. Someday perhaps change will occur when times are ready for it instead of always when it is too late. Someday change will be accepted as life itself.

Shirley Maclaine

#42. I make my mistakes in public.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#44. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

#45. I think male actors get confused by their own vanity.

Shirley Maclaine

#46. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#48. The pain of leaving those you grow to love is only the prelude to understanding yourself and others.

Shirley Maclaine

#49. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

#50. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

#51. I live in too many cities.

Shirley Maclaine

#52. The mob taught me how to play gin rummy.

Shirley Maclaine

#53. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#55. We are not victims of the world we see, we are victims of the way we see the world.

Shirley Maclaine

#56. If I could know me, I could know the universe.

Shirley Maclaine

#57. For me, the safest place is out on a limb.

Shirley Maclaine

#58. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

#59. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#61. If they would teach us from the time we're little to meditate and get in touch with all that our souls know, we wouldn't fight so much.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#64. No one ever really leaves Hollywood. No one really leaves unless they are called away by God. Even then, the impulse would be to come back again and make a movie about the experience.

Shirley Maclaine

#65. Anything is possible if you believe you deserve it.

Shirley Maclaine

#66. I'd like to go to another planet, which I might live long enough to accomplish. Just get on a spaceship and go. But not the moon. I don't see any flowers there. The moon is too close. I want to go further.

Shirley Maclaine

#67. When times are bad, people like to lose themselves in the sheer glamour of another period: beautiful wardrobes, magnificent meals served in elegant settings.

Shirley Maclaine

#68. Of course I'm schooled in the old school method: taking what I think the director wants, then reworking it through my own brain and heart.

Shirley Maclaine

#69. I'm not unaware of how I'm perceived, I just don't care about it. Unless I really hurt someone's feelings. I care about that.

Shirley Maclaine

#70. Audrey was the kind of person who when she saw someone else suffering tried to take their pain on herself. She was a healer. She knew how to love. You didn't have to be in constant contact with her to feel you had a friend. We always picked up right where we left off.

Shirley Maclaine

#71. Maybe the tragedy of the human race was that we had forgotten that we are each divine.

Shirley Maclaine

#72. You have to surrender to the energy above and below.

Shirley Maclaine

#73. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#75. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#78. The loss of magic is the denial of unlimited possibility.

Shirley Maclaine

#79. Art is about energy positive and negative. All art has the power to heal because it helps us see who we are, and what we resist.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#82. People think I'm nuts.

Shirley Maclaine

#83. I don't do like diva trips and stuff.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#85. God bless that potential that we all have for making anything possible if we think we deserve it. I deserve this.

Shirley Maclaine

#86. The best way to get husbands to do something is to suggest that perhaps they are too old to do it.

Shirley Maclaine

#87. My gift is that I'm not beautiful. My career was never about looks. It's about health and being in good shape.

Shirley Maclaine

#88. I can't give up my own identity.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#90. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

#91. 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.

Shirley Maclaine

#92. The more sex becomes a non-issue in people's lives, the happier they are.

Shirley Maclaine

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

Shirley Maclaine

#94. Sex is hardly ever just about sex.

Shirley Maclaine

#95. 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.

Shirley Maclaine