Top 60 Ethel Waters Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am somebody cause God don’t make no junk.”

— Ethel Waters

2. “We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.”

— Ethel Waters

3. “I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.”

— Ethel Waters

4. “Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.”

— Ethel Waters

5. “We miss a lot in life because we don’t know when to quit, what to leave out.”

— Ethel Waters

6. “Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.”

— Ethel Waters

7. “I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.”

— Ethel Waters

8. “I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.”

— Ethel Waters

9. “Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.”

— Ethel Waters

10. “When you dominate other people’s emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.”

— Ethel Waters

11. “I’m not afraid to die. I’m looking forward to it. I know the Lord has His arms wrapped around this big sparrow.”

— Ethel Waters

12. “What broke Mom’s heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.”

— Ethel Waters

13. “I don’t care to dress up except when it is necessary or good for my business.”

— Ethel Waters

14. “Mom never quit on me. My only regret is that she didn’t live long enough to share some of the money and comforts my work in show business has brought me.”

— Ethel Waters

15. “Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.”

— Ethel Waters

16. “Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.”

— Ethel Waters

17. “I know the most terrible thing that can happen to a woman. That is the gang-up. Men put you to sleep with their drops and one man after another goes in and takes you.”

— Ethel Waters

18. “Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.”

— Ethel Waters

19. “There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.”

— Ethel Waters

20. “I have reason to be shy. I’ve been hurt plenty.”

— Ethel Waters

21. “It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.”

— Ethel Waters

22. “I learned early in life not to judge others. We outcasts are very happy and content to leave that job to our social superiors.”

— Ethel Waters

23. “I have no acting technique I act instinctively. That’s why I can’t play any role that isn’t based on something in my life.”

— Ethel Waters

24. “I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there’s something in me that prevents me from handing it out.”

— Ethel Waters

25. “My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.”

— Ethel Waters

26. “All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.”

— Ethel Waters

27. “I wondered what I would do if I didn’t have my God to turn to and be able to read the Book He had divinely inspired.”

— Ethel Waters

28. “Though I was excited about the Sojourner Truth play, it was not reassuring to think that my entire future might depend on the success of that one show.”

— Ethel Waters

29. “Ignorance, foolishness, and poverty-we owned this by our birth.”

— Ethel Waters

30. “There’s no hypocrisy in Hell’s Kitchen.”

— Ethel Waters

31. “The big compliment came from the beer drinkers who didn’t know me. They wouldn’t drink or move when I sang. If they had their glasses in mid-air, the glasses wouldn’t come down.”

— Ethel Waters

32. “I found that a couple of bottles of beer would give me a lift, but the third bottle would sober me up.”

— Ethel Waters

33. “We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.”

— Ethel Waters

34. “I had always loved John Ford’s pictures. And I came to love him, too, but I was frightened to death working for him. He used the shock treatment while directing me.”

— Ethel Waters

35. “Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.”

— Ethel Waters

36. “I am an isolationist.”

— Ethel Waters

37. “I could depend a lot on my shaking, though I never shimmied vulgarly and only to express myself.”

— Ethel Waters

38. “There had been lots of crises in my life. And there was plenty of spunk and battle cry still left in me.”

— Ethel Waters

39. “What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.”

— Ethel Waters

40. “Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.”

— Ethel Waters

41. “Twenty-five years is a long time for a girl to live out of a trunk, and after looking over a few houses, I fell in love with one in Southwest Los Angeles.”

— Ethel Waters

42. “I have always been psychic. The walls of any room I walk into talk to me.”

— Ethel Waters

43. “Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn’t want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.”

— Ethel Waters

44. “The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.”

— Ethel Waters

45. “All my life I’ve been prejudiced against wealthy people.”

— Ethel Waters

46. “After years in white theaters I dreaded working in colored houses. The noise, the stomping, whistling, and cheering that hadn’t annoyed me when I was young was now something I dreaded.”

— Ethel Waters

47. “I wanted to be with the kind of people I’d grown up with, but you can’t go back to them and be one of them again, no matter how hard you try.”

— Ethel Waters

48. “My aunts lived on liquor and seldom felt like eating much. I don’t know what’s wrong about a kid stealing when he’s hungry.”

— Ethel Waters

49. “We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.”

— Ethel Waters

50. “There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.”

— Ethel Waters