Top 120 Charlize Theron Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I love being a woman and I love being feminine.”

— Charlize Theron

2. “I don’t think you can create anything interesting from a comfort zone. You have to work from a place of fear and failure.”

— Charlize Theron

3. “I don’t believe in charmed lives. I think that tragedy is part of the lesson you learn to lift yourself up, to pick yourself up and to move on.”

— Charlize Theron

4. “You choose the life you want for yourself, and then you just shut up and go about it. That’s how I’ve lived my life.”

— Charlize Theron

5. “I think more than anything, people just want to be understood.”

— Charlize Theron

6. “Oh my God I am so cool.”

— Charlize Theron

7. “I’m not a fan of justifying bad behavior or justifying why people are the way they are. I think that’s a cop out. I don’t have a lot of empathy for that.”

— Charlize Theron

8. “I like being a cog in a wheel. I like being a small aspect of a much bigger thing, and I think my interest in that takes the pressure of myself.”

— Charlize Theron

9. “Beauty is more than skin deep.”

— Charlize Theron

10. “When a person lives a very happy life they become beautiful.”

— Charlize Theron

11. “I do this because I’m an observer of people. That’s why I want to be an actor. I’m fascinated by human beings and the circumstances they find themselves in.”

— Charlize Theron

12. “I have OCD, which is not fun. I have to be incredibly tidy and organized or it messes with my mind and switches off on me.”

— Charlize Theron

13. “We don’t live the lives of Eskimos. We don’t need to kill animals for fashion.”

— Charlize Theron

14. “I havent lost my culture, just my accent.”

— Charlize Theron

15. “Well, life is dark. We live in a very dark world. When they call them “dark films” it annoys me, because they’re very real stories. They’re stories I have seen or experienced or witnessed, and coming from that place, that is the hope of humanity.”

— Charlize Theron

16. “I’m a tough girl, and I can go without a shower bot a week and be fine with that. But I will not sleep on dirty sheets.”

— Charlize Theron

17. “We all understand situations where it’s swim or drown. Sometimes we surprise ourselves when we start swimming and see how well we can do it.”

— Charlize Theron

18. “I’m a true believer that everything happens the way it should.”

— Charlize Theron

19. “I think good filmmaking is when you really hold the mirror up truthfully, and you don’t angle it and you don’t hide things with smoke and mirrors.”

— Charlize Theron

20. “You know, I don’t think any mother aims to be a single mom. I didn’t wish for that, but it happened.”

— Charlize Theron

21. “There’s nothing I despise more than people trying to be something that they’re not.”

— Charlize Theron

22. “I think there is a great quote – and I feel horrible that I don’t know who said this – but it was a great quote, it says, “The only difference between all of us are the ones who are loved and the ones who are not.””

— Charlize Theron

23. “I think of myself as a highly sexual creature.”

— Charlize Theron

24. “I hate actors who come and quote Nietzsche.”

— Charlize Theron

25. “I am human, and, yeah, I have very bad days.”

— Charlize Theron

26. “It’s in the eyes, mostly. Don’t listen just to the other actor’s lines. Look at – and listen to – their eyes. That’s where the emotion comes through.”

— Charlize Theron

27. “If they ever do my life story, whoever plays me needs lots of hair color and high heels.”

— Charlize Theron

28. “I’m happy for people who want to get married but it’s not my thing. I’m extremely happy in my relationship and I would love to have kids.”

— Charlize Theron

29. “The tone is so important to a film, and that tone can really make something fall or succeed.”

— Charlize Theron

30. “I don’t really talk about my personal life and I don’t really talk about my relationships. I’m not a big partier. I like the simplicity of my life, and I’ve chosen the kind of life I really want to live. I don’t think my life is boring at all.”

— Charlize Theron

31. “I’ve always been comfortable with my sexuality. I’m blessed to have been raised by a woman who never made me feel ashamed about what’s underneath my clothes. That’s a part of me and I don’t run away from it.”

— Charlize Theron

32. “I learned everything about love, watching ‘Splash.’ That’s why I’m still single, so thanks Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah for that.”

— Charlize Theron

33. “Looks alone won’t get you that far. It may get you in the door, but there’s always somebody younger, somebody prettier. You have to rely on something else.”

— Charlize Theron

34. “There’s only so much you can do, but if somebody doesn’t give you a chance there is nothing you can do.”

— Charlize Theron

35. “Hey, I’m a girl, and we like to play dress-up.”

— Charlize Theron

36. “My mom has made it possible for me to be who I am. Our family is everything. Her greatest skill was encouraging me to find my own person and own independence.”

— Charlize Theron

37. “I don’t want to be put on a pedestal. I don’t want to be anything other than what we are. I want to just be a woman.”

— Charlize Theron

38. “You have to discipline yourself and not carry the character with you. You need to switch it off and take time to re-energize.”

— Charlize Theron

39. “I’ve always said that I worry about being with a man who doesn’t flirt.”

— Charlize Theron

40. “I’m 50-50 on glamour stuff. I’d rather put on a pair of jeans and get on my Harley and act like a guy.”

— Charlize Theron

41. “I have a problem with cabinets being messy and people just shoving things in and closing the door. I will lie in bed and not be able to sleep because I’ll say to myself: ‘I think I saw something in that cabinet that just shouldn’t be there.’”

— Charlize Theron

42. “At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.”

— Charlize Theron

43. “I grew up in South Africa and I would look at maps and we were at the bottom of the world. There was this whole thing up there. I was always reading encyclopedias about the world. So travel was something I was always attracted to.”

— Charlize Theron

44. “You are only as great as the opportunities that are given to you.”

— Charlize Theron

45. “I’m interested in human behavior, and what happened in my family life is definitely not a unique story. There are aspects of that I’m sure you can see through the work. But I’m just looking for something that touches me.”

— Charlize Theron

46. “I hate table reads. I hate anything where you have to say the words out loud.”

— Charlize Theron

47. “I met a woman in Albuquerque and she came and hung out with me in the trailer. It was really just more to kind of really understand my biggest concern was always the interrogation scenes. Remember, that’s why I really wanted to meet somebody because you see those scenes on TV so much.”

— Charlize Theron

48. “Fran McDormand was great because she said, ‘What I used to do when I worked with him was I would just walk on the set and I would give him a big hug. Somehow his guard would just drop.’ So I took that advice.”

— Charlize Theron

49. “So far I’m not surprised by anything about being a mom. It’s all pretty great – but that’s what I expected.”

— Charlize Theron

50. “Marriage equality is about more than just marriage. It’s about something greater. It’s about acceptance.”

— Charlize Theron