Top 100 Maggie Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s very middle class.”

— Maggie Smith

2. “What is embarrassment but a relative of fear? You’ve been seen – caught – at being imperfect.”

— Maggie Smith

3. “Theres a difference between solitude and loneliness.”

— Maggie Smith

4. “It is not your job to make other people comfortable with who you are.”

— Maggie Smith

5. “People say it gets better but it doesn’t. It just gets different, that’s all.”

— Maggie Smith

6. “How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves – all of our selves – wherever we go.”

— Maggie Smith

7. “I’m hopeless – all I know is that time is going past so fast.”

— Maggie Smith

8. “The performances you have in your head are always much better than the performances on stage.”

— Maggie Smith

9. “Ask yourself about the kind of life you want: What would you do day to day, and with whom, and where? Consider the life you have. Do one thing today, however small, to close the gap between the two.”

— Maggie Smith

10. “It seems to me there is a change in what audiences want to see. I can only hope that’s correct, because there’s an awful lot of people of my age around now and we outnumber the others.”

— Maggie Smith

11. “I believe that I am past my prime. I had reckoned on my prime lasting till I was at least fifty.”

— Maggie Smith

12. “I’m so moved to hear Celia Johnson again, so lovely.”

— Maggie Smith

13. “There is a kind of invisible thread between the actor and the audience, and when it’s there it’s stunning, and there is nothing to match that.”

— Maggie Smith

14. “I like being outside and working with the elements. The elemental aspects of it. The physicality of it.”

— Maggie Smith

15. “I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost – it’s there and then it’s gone.”

— Maggie Smith

16. “It’s true I don’t tolerate fools but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky. Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”

— Maggie Smith

17. “Accept that you are a work in progress, both a revision and a draft: you are better and more complete than earlier versions of yourself, but you also have work to do. Be open to change. Allow yourself to be revised.”

— Maggie Smith

18. “Today I think of myself as a ‘recovering pessimist.’ I know that optimism is not at odds with wisdom. It’s quite the opposite. I think of cynicism as cool but lazy, while hope is desperately uncool – it has sweaty palms and an earnest smile on its face. What I know to be true is that one hopeful person will accomplish more than a hundred cynics. Why? Because the hopeful person will try.”

— Maggie Smith

19. “Torma means “offering cake.” You offer the torma to your don. You feed the ghost that does you harm, “that which possesses you.” Giving it a little something sweet is a way of saying, Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.”

— Maggie Smith

20. “The last couple of years have been a write-off, though I’m beginning to feel like a person now. My energy is coming back.”

— Maggie Smith

21. “I know there is something out there and like most people, I tend to believe in it more when things go bad.”

— Maggie Smith

22. “Remember a time when you forgave someone, how freeing that felt. You deserve your mercy as much as anyone else does. Forgive yourself for something today, something you wish you’d done differently. Just let it go. Free yourself from it.”

— Maggie Smith

23. “When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.”

— Maggie Smith

24. “Commit yourself to the present. Loosen your grip on the life you had before – before a loss, an upheaval, a change that called everything into question – so that you can be here, where you’re needed, right now. KEEP MOVING. Do something today that will bring you joy even if you know you will not do it well.”

— Maggie Smith

25. “Do not be led by fear; fear cannot lead you out of the dark. Find whatever bits of hope you can – a trail of even the smallest bread crumbs, even the tiniest pebbles reflecting the moonlight – and follow them.”

— Maggie Smith

26. “Think of what you’ve achieved that didn’t seem possible last year, or five years ago, or ten; it didn’t seem possible then but you’ve proven that it was. Now imagine what might be possible in another year or five or ten. KEEP MOVING. Ask yourself what you would do if you had an unlimited supply of both courage and hope. Now begin answering that question with action. Take one step today – then repeat, repeat, repeat.”

— Maggie Smith

27. “Try not to cry too much because it can be pretty heart-breaking and pretty hard.”

— Maggie Smith

28. “I just did adore Daniel – Daniel Radcliffe, who I had worked with before “Harry Potter” and spent a long time telling all the producers they had to see him because I thought he was so terrific. And it’s been sad thinking about it because of Alan Rickman.”

— Maggie Smith

29. “The drama school was in Oxford – and it’s funny to think of it, but in those days when I started out the University was nearly all male. And they certainly weren’t mixed.”

— Maggie Smith

30. “I had a very good English teacher who said to me that she thought I ought to do it. She – I don’t know, she saw something thank goodness because I think if it hadn’t been encouraged by somebody that serious, I’m not sure what would’ve happened to me.”

— Maggie Smith

31. “I’d done “Gosford Park,” a film that Julian Fellowes had written that Robert Altman directed.”

— Maggie Smith

32. “It’s funny to be pigeonholed so late in life but there we are.”

— Maggie Smith

33. “The chemotherapy was very peculiar, something that makes you feel much worse than the cancer itself, a very nasty thing. I used to go to treatment on my own, and nearly everybody else was with somebody. I wouldn’t have liked that. Why would you want to make anybody sit in those places?”

— Maggie Smith

34. “I tend to head for what’s amusing because a lot of things aren’t happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything.”

— Maggie Smith

35. “I had been feeling a little rum. I didn’t think it was anything serious because years ago I felt a lump and it was benign. I assumed this would be too. It kind of takes the wind out of your sails, and I don’t know what the future holds, if anything.”

— Maggie Smith

36. “I think everybody who was in it thought they were all going to be Eartha Kitt or be big stars. That didn’t happen, but it was a wake-up call to have one’s first professional job on Broadway, I must say.”

— Maggie Smith

37. “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, and one’s still acting.”

— Maggie Smith

38. “I said ‘It can’t go on’ and he said ‘No, it can’t.’ Honestly, I don’t think I could have mattered less to him by then. But by then, nothing mattered to him.”

— Maggie Smith

39. “People think of you differently if you’ve been in their homes. They think they own you because they watched you while they were eating dinner, or they can turn you up or down, or even freeze you.”

— Maggie Smith

40. “The thing is, often press people ask questions that are so personal that even your nearest and dearest wouldn’t ask them.”

— Maggie Smith

41. “Stop searching yourself trying to understand why someone else treated you the way they did. The answer is not inside you; it’s inside them, out of reach.”

— Maggie Smith

42. “I don’t think films about elderly people have been made very much. I think of Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy. But they always seem to be fairly successful, so it’s a bit baffling as to why everybody has to be treated as if they were five-years-old.”

— Maggie Smith

43. “An actor is somebody who communicates someone else’s words and emotions to an audience. It’s not me. It’s what writers want me to be.”

— Maggie Smith

44. “I think there’s always great tension because there never seems to be enough – there is always pressure. There’s always pressure because there isn’t enough time. There’s never enough time for a movie, it seems to me. Never.”

— Maggie Smith

45. “Sort of what you do in drama school when asked to play something way out of your reach. Anyway, we used to laugh a lot about that. I used to say I’m not going to act old, Penelope. I’ll just be myself.”

— Maggie Smith

46. “There were male colleges, and there were very few female colleges.”

— Maggie Smith

47. “Give the present the gift of your full attention.”

— Maggie Smith

48. “Your work is being yourself, offering what you can to others. You’ve been doing it all along. Now do it with intention.”

— Maggie Smith

49. “I am just surprised to be doing anything at my age actually. When you think of where I am now and where I’ve come from, I am very pleased and very grateful to be standing up and delivering Julian’s great lines.”

— Maggie Smith

50. “Listen, I must be 110 by now. Granny is going to kick the bucket at some point.”

— Maggie Smith