Top 100 Sidney Poitier Quotes
#1. I come from a great family. I've seen family life and I know how wonderful, how nurturing, and how wonderful it can be.
Sidney Poitier
#2. I do know that I'm responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it.
Sidney Poitier
#3. I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in a movie theater watching unfolding on the screen images of myself - not me, but black people - that were uncomfortable.
Sidney Poitier
#4. If I'm remembered for having done a few good things, and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that's plenty.
Sidney Poitier
#5. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#8. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#9. So I'm OK with myself, with history, my work, who I am and who I was.
Sidney Poitier
#10. I think the way I want to think. I live the way I want to live.
Sidney Poitier
#11. We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists ... in the loved one, perfection.
Sidney Poitier
#12. I set my star so high that I would constantly be in motion toward it.
Sidney Poitier
#14. I learned to hear silence. That's the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters.
Sidney Poitier
#15. A good deed here, a good deed there, a good thought here, a good comment there, all added up to my career in one way or another.
Sidney Poitier
#17. I am not a hugely religious person, but I believe that there is a oneness with everything. And because there is this oneness, it is possible that my mother is the principal reason for my life.
Sidney Poitier
#18. When you walk with someone, something unspoken happens. Either you match their pace or they match yours.
Sidney Poitier
#19. So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.
Sidney Poitier
#22. I had learned something of Miami from people who had visited there, so I knew what to expect.
Sidney Poitier
#23. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#24. My father was a certain kind of man - I saw how he treated my mother and his family and how he treated strangers. And I vowed I would never make a film that would not reflect properly on my father's name.
Sidney Poitier
#25. I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.
Sidney Poitier
#26. If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. You simply won't.
Sidney Poitier
#28. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#29. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#30. I wanted to explore the values that are at work, underpinning my life.
Sidney Poitier
#31. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#32. To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed.
Sidney Poitier
#33. I was not the kind of a principal player that was so in demand that eight or 10 or 12 scripts came per month.
Sidney Poitier
#35. The journey has been incredible from its beginning.
Sidney Poitier
#36. Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.
Sidney Poitier
#37. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#39. Far as I can tell, I still have most of my hair, my gut is not hanging over my belt, and I still have all of my teeth.
Sidney Poitier
#40. I have a kind of respect
a worshipful attitude, even
for nature and the natural order and the cosmos and the seasons ...
Sidney Poitier
#41. A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better.
Sidney Poitier
#42. To be compared to Jackie Robinson is an enormous compliment, but I don't think it's necessarily deserved.
Sidney Poitier
#43. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#45. An appreciable number of directors have shifted to lower-cost films, allowing them to be satisfied with a more modest return.
Sidney Poitier
#46. You don't have to become something that you aren't to become better than you are.
Sidney Poitier
#47. I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida. It was so blatant ... I had never been so described as Florida described me.
Sidney Poitier
#48. I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values.
Sidney Poitier
#49. So much of life, it seems, is determined by pure randomness.
Sidney Poitier
#50. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#51. I decided in my life that I would do nothing that did not reflect positively on my father's life.
Sidney Poitier
#52. My mother was the most amazing person. She taught me to be kind to other women. She believed in family. She was with my father from the first day they met. All that I am, she taught me.
Sidney Poitier
#53. As a man, I've been representative of the values I hold dear. And the values I hold dear are carryovers from the lives of my parents.
Sidney Poitier
#54. I lived in a country where I couldn't live where I wanted to live. I lived in a country where I couldn't go where I wanted to eat. I lived in a country where I couldn't get a job, except for those put aside for people of my colour or caste.
Sidney Poitier
#56. When I set out to become an actor, I had set myself a standard.
Sidney Poitier
#57. But I always had the ability to say no. That's how I called my own shots.
Sidney Poitier
#58. So it's been kind of a long road, but it was a good journey altogether.
Sidney Poitier
#59. If you apologize because you are afraid, then you are a child not a man.
Sidney Poitier
#60. Mine was an easy ride compared to Jackie Robinson's.
Sidney Poitier
#62. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#63. My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.
Sidney Poitier
#64. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#65. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#67. I wanted to look at them because I feel, internally, that I am an ordinary person who has had an extraordinary life.
Sidney Poitier
#68. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#69. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#71. Stay from underfoot and don't get into any trouble. You hear me?" "Yes, ma'am, I hear you." Due to past experience, she may not have completely believed me. When
Sidney Poitier
#72. I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else's vision of me.
Sidney Poitier
#73. Since I couldn't actuate the things that I wanted to do, the only weapon I had was to say no.
Sidney Poitier
#75. Marriage is no way of life for the weak, the selfish, or the insecure.
Sidney Poitier
#76. We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.
Sidney Poitier
#77. Racism is very painful. That's life. It never ends.
Sidney Poitier
#78. Acting isn't a game of "pretend." It's an exercise in being real.
Sidney Poitier
#79. So I had to be careful. I recognized the responsibility that, whether I liked it or not, I had to accept whatever the obligation was. That was to behave in a manner, to carry myself in such a professional way, as if there ever is a reflection, it's a positive one.
Sidney Poitier
#80. In my case, the body of work stands for itself ... I think my work has been representative of me as a man.
Sidney Poitier
#81. Living
consciously involves being genuine; it involves listening and
responding to others honestly and openly; it involves being in the
moment.
Sidney Poitier
#82. I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.
Sidney Poitier
#84. I had to satisfy the action fans, the romantic fans, the intellectual fans. It was a terrific burden.
Sidney Poitier
#85. True 'joy' is the difference between just amusing ourselves to death and creating 'meaningful' pleasure.
Sidney Poitier
#86. I sometimes like the pictures photographers take of me.
Sidney Poitier
#87. I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life.
Sidney Poitier
#88. I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words - and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.
Sidney Poitier
#89. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#90. I always wanted to be someone better the next day than I was the day before.
Sidney Poitier
#91. But my dad also was a remarkable man, a good person, a principled individual, a man of integrity.
Sidney Poitier
#93. Generally, I tend to despise human behavior rather than human creatures.
Sidney Poitier
#94. I wouldn't change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it.
Sidney Poitier
#95. You don't have to become something you're not to be better than you were.
Sidney Poitier
#96. 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.
Sidney Poitier
#98. There is not racial or ethnic domination of hopelessness. It's everywhere.
Sidney Poitier
#99. I have always been a learner because I knew nothing.
Sidney Poitier
#100. I never had an occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was ... a human being.
Sidney Poitier
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