Top 50 Lupita Nyong'o Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No matter where you’re from, your dreams are valid.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

Featured in: Self-Worth Quotes, Acceptance Quotes, Cute Quotes, Humanism Quotes, Diversity Quotes

2. “Seek perfection, and find joy in never attaining it.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

3. “It’s in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person’s circumstances and another person’s experience.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

4. “It’s only when you risk failure that you discover things. When you play it safe, you’re not expressing the utmost of your human experience.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

5. “What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion: for yourself and for those around you.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

6. “You fail, and then what? Life goes on. It’s only when you risk failure that you discover things.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

7. “In the madness, you have to find calm.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

8. “What I’ve learned from myself is that I don’t have to be anybody else. Myself is good enough.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

9. “You can’t eat beauty, it doesn’t sustain you. What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion, for yourself and those around you. That kind of beauty inflamed the heart and merchants the soul.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

10. “Even in my dreams of being an actor, my dream was not in the celebrity. My dream was in the work that I wanted to do.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

11. “I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

12. “It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

13. “You have to allow for the impossible to be possible.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

14. “What I will say is that what I have learned for myself is that I don’t have to be anybody else; and that myself is good enough; and that when I am being true to that self, then I can avail myself to extraordinary thingsYou have to allow for the impossible to be possible.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

15. “You can’t eat beauty. It doesn’t feed you.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

16. “We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

17. “Drama is my sweet spot, but the thing about being an actor is that you want to do a variety of things. I definitely love fantasy and would want to be in a fantasy project.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

18. “I have a very ostrich mentality. I feel like I have my head in the sand so no one can see me.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

19. “I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

20. “That you will feel the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside. There is no shade to that beauty.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

21. “As actors, you become an expert at starting over.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

22. “Human beings have an instinct for freedom.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

23. “I grew up in Nairobi, which is the capital of Kenya, so it’s hustle and bustle, and there’s always something going on.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

24. “I’ve worked hard to feel beautiful in my natural skin. Personally, I don’t ever want to depend on makeup to feel beautiful.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

25. “Being called gorgeous is not a bad thing! But at the same time, I don’t want to thrive on people’s opinions of me.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

26. “My immediate family was always very supportive. It was my own fear of the rest of the world not accepting me, the rest of our society not accepting my wish to be an actor.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

27. “I can speak of actors that I love. I love Cate Blanchett, Viola Davis, her tenacity. I love Charlize Theron. She’s so surprising and so exhilarating, the kinds of projects she takes on. Marion Cotillard as well.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

28. “What’s becoming very obvious to me is that fashion is art.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

29. “To this day, I love eating steak tacos before going to the red carpets.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

30. “There’s always a sense of newness with acting, because every role, you come to every role fresh.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

31. “I’m pretty awesome at making salad dressings.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

32. “I went to the Independent Spirit Awards and won.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

33. “I grew up watching foreign programs – American, English, Mexican, and very little Kenyan. ‘The Color Purple’ was the first time I saw people who looked like me.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

34. “It’s great to have something to dress up for. You know, I spent three years in slacks at drama school, so now I like putting a dress on.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

35. “Whoopi Goldberg looked like me, she had hair like mine, she was dark like me. I’d been starved for images of myself. I’d grown up watching a lot of American TV.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

36. “Part of being an artist is that you are always concerned you don’t have what it takes. It keeps us honest.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

37. “I definitely intend to create my own work in the future so that we don’t have to keep saying we don’t have work for black women. But right now I don’t know what’s next. I hope that there are more opportunities to come my way.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

38. “I had this vivid image of myself at the age of 60 looking back on my life and truly regretting the fact that I hadn’t tried to be an actor.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

39. “I do my best work when I feel conviction to say something through the character I play. Always I want to have integrity and not compromise that.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

40. “When I was younger, I was almost too afraid to admit that I wanted to be an actor. I didn’t know any successful actors in Kenya, so I felt like I could get away with going to college to study film more easily than I could with saying, ‘I want to be an actor.’ That’s what I did.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

41. “The muscles you flex in theater are muscles that you really need. I must always find a way to get back there. It’s irreplaceable.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

42. “I always love to learn new things. That’s the reason I like being an actor.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

43. “Steve McQueen is a genius. And I think that word is overused, but I think with Steve it’s rightly used. He’s a genius.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

44. “As human beings, what makes us able to empathize with people is a connection that is not necessarily understood mentally.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

45. “I’m interested in generating work for myself. I have trouble with this waiting-for-the-phone-to-ring lifestyle, especially after drama school, which was so creatively fulfilling.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

46. “I think it’s a real gift to be faced with man’s potential for extreme cruelty but also man’s resilience and the fact that love really does conquer everything. It’s the only answer to these kinds of atrocities and it’s not a passive thing.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

47. “Happiness is the most important thing.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

48. “I like to wear things, I don’t like things to wear me.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

49. “I never, in my wildest dreams, could I have thought that the first role I get out of school would lead to an Oscar nomination.”

— Lupita Nyong'o

50. “Makeup isn’t something I’ve worn a lot of in my life.”

— Lupita Nyong'o