Top 70 Cicely Tyson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The moment anyone tries to demean or degrade you in any way, you have to know how great you are. Nobody would bother to beat you down if you were not a threat.”

— Cicely Tyson

2. “Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never really knew. They’re what make the instrument stretch, what make you go beyond the norm.”

— Cicely Tyson

3. “I am not a quitter. I will fight until I drop. It is just a matter of having some faith in the fact that as long as you are able to draw breath in the universe, you have a chance.”

— Cicely Tyson

4. “I think when you begin to think of yourself as having achieved something, then there’s nothing left for you to work towards. I want to believe that there is a mountain so high that I will spend my entire life striving to reach the top of it.”

— Cicely Tyson

5. “One of the things I have always said about the man-woman relationship is that I don’t want anybody to walk ahead of me and I don’t want anybody to walk behind me. I want a man who will walk along beside me. And that’s how I feel about equal rights.”

— Cicely Tyson

6. “You never know what motivates you.”

— Cicely Tyson

7. “To soar toward what’s possible, you must leave behind what’s comfortable.”

— Cicely Tyson

8. “All I have to do is find someone who has something to say that will enrich my life and they can’t get rid of me.”

— Cicely Tyson

9. “Children should have a balanced start in life: a mother and a father. I think that’s the only reason to get married.”

— Cicely Tyson

10. “I saw that I could not afford the luxury of just being an actress. So I made a choice to use my career as a platform to address the issues of the race I was born into.”

— Cicely Tyson

11. “When I told my mother that I wanted to be an actress, she said, you can’t live here and do that, and so I moved out. I was determined to prove her wrong because she was so sure that I was going to go astray. And that’s the juice that kept me going.”

— Cicely Tyson

12. “I have learned not to allow rejection to move me.”

— Cicely Tyson

14. “Children lie out of fear they will be punished in some way. But adults, as I see it, have no right to lie.”

— Cicely Tyson

15. “The most potent antidote to reticence is survival.”

— Cicely Tyson

16. “If each person in this world will simply take a small piece of this huge thing, this amazing quilt, and work it regardless of the color of the yarn, we will have harmony on this planet.”

— Cicely Tyson

17. “Whatever good I have accomplished as an actress I believe came in direct proportion to my efforts to portray black women who have made positive contributions to my heritage.”

— Cicely Tyson

18. “When I attack a role, be it TV, film or stage, the first thing I say is, I don’t want to know anything. If it’s good I don’t want to hear it; if it’s bad I don’t want to hear it. The only thing either thing can do is distract me. I like to stay focused.”

— Cicely Tyson

19. “I don’t condemn anyone for making their choices. If someone chooses those roles, fine. But not for me. When someone stops me and says, You’re the reason I became an actress, that lets me know I made the right decision.”

— Cicely Tyson

20. “We have to support our own films. If we don’t, how can we expect others to support them?”

— Cicely Tyson

21. “I was in California when this journalist made a blanket statement about the fact that she did not think that black men and women had the kind of love relationship that Rebecca and Nathan had in Sounder.”

— Cicely Tyson

22. “Turning a blind eye to our history has not saved us from its consequences.”

— Cicely Tyson

23. “When you know your history, you know your value. You know the price that has been paid for you to be here. You recognize what those who came before you built and sacrificed for you to inhabit the space in which you dwell.”

— Cicely Tyson

24. “Knowing your generational story firms the ground upon which you stand. It makes your life, your struggles and triumphs, bigger than your lone existence. It connects you to a grand plotline.”

— Cicely Tyson

25. “People don’t come out of nowhere. They have roots.”

— Cicely Tyson

26. “As life has taught me time and again, you often have to lose your present circumstance to make room for your forthcoming one.”

— Cicely Tyson

27. “God is the Master of the unlikely.”

— Cicely Tyson

28. “Why wouldn’t I be working? The alternative is to sit around making butt prints.”

— Cicely Tyson

29. “I’m grateful that God often laughs at our plans and substitutes his better ones.”

— Cicely Tyson

30. “Art, in a sense, is the transference of pleasure.”

— Cicely Tyson

31. “We are defined not by what grows from our heads, but what flows from our hearts. That is our greatest testimony. Our hair may be our crown, yet a life of love and service is our real glory. So as we navigate our journey, let us graciously make space for one another. Whether you relax it or coil it, weave it or dread it, cover it with a wig or cut it plumb off, the choice is yours. Good hair is your hair – however you decide to wear it.”

— Cicely Tyson

32. “Death is a love note to the living, to regard every day, every breath, as sacred.”

— Cicely Tyson

33. “When someone sees you headed in a direction, and that person throws a brick into the road, that is the precise moment to forge onward, with greater velocity, toward your destination.”

— Cicely Tyson

34. “Black women – our essence, our emotional intricacies, the indignities we carry in our bones – are the most deeply misunderstood human beings in history. Those who know nothing about us have had the audacity to try to introduce us to ourselves, in the unsteady strokes of caricature, on stages, in books, and through their distorted reflections of us.”

— Cicely Tyson

35. “Intimidation is a prerequisite to growth as an artist.”

— Cicely Tyson

36. “Just walking through this life as a Black person, and actually surviving that, was and still is an ovation-worthy performance.”

— Cicely Tyson

37. “To be seen in this life, truly observed without judgment, is what it feels like to be loved.”

— Cicely Tyson

38. “Relationships are knitted together by need. When two people connect, the purpose each is serving in the other’s life is what holds the union in place, keeps the ragged edges of its hemline sewn.”

— Cicely Tyson

39. “Anger would’ve been the justified response, and for a time in private, I was certainly apoplectic. But as life has taught me more than once, resentment corrodes the veins of the person who carries it.”

— Cicely Tyson

40. “I am not a quitter. I will fight until I drop. It is just a matter of having some faith in the fact that as long as you are able to draw breath in the universe, you have a chance.” Happy 94th birthday to the regal and ever-resilient Cicely Tyson, an actress for the ages!”

— Cicely Tyson

41. “Our feet tell our stories. They carry us through this life, moving us from one sorrow and season to the next. Our gait can reveal us to be buoyant or bullish, dispirited or steadfast.”

— Cicely Tyson

42. “You always seek to control others when you are not in full ownership of yourself.”

— Cicely Tyson

43. “We each have many faces, various ways of appearing and behaving. In one moment, we may show remarkable steadfastness, and in another, an aching vulnerability. We can be at turns tranquil and belligerent, jubilant and despairing. We are inherently multifaceted and yet marvelously complete.”

— Cicely Tyson

44. “Healing, as I see it, is not the absence of pain. Rather it is a gradual reduction in the ache. The lessening of that hurt eventually makes room for fond memories to surface.”

— Cicely Tyson

45. “We may never realize the extent to which our behaviors impact our children, how they seek validation in our every word and smile, gaze and gesture.”

— Cicely Tyson

46. “The Father has a way of choosing the flawed to attempt what many deem improbable.”

— Cicely Tyson

47. “In the life of every Black child, a moment arrives when he or she becomes wrenchingly aware of how we are perceived. This bruising recognition was among my first.”

— Cicely Tyson

48. “America has our blood on its palms, our flesh between its teeth. When you come to understand what we have endured, when you let the barefaced savagery of it all truly penetrate, you are forever haunted by the horror.”

— Cicely Tyson

49. “People don’t come out of nowhere. They have roots.” Someone’s appearance and demeanor, she reasoned, offer clues to those beginnings, to the whys and hows of that person’s present state. That notion becomes applicable when analyzing a character, when noticing how his or her story may manifest in every tic and sway, every lurch forward. Infusing a portrayal with such layers of truth is an actor’s greatest aspiration.”

— Cicely Tyson

50. “Social transformation is not measured in weeks or months, but in generation.”

— Cicely Tyson