Top 400 Marilyn Monroe Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Everybody says I can’t act. They said the same thing about Elizabeth Taylor. And they were wrong. She was great in A Place in the Sun. I’ll never get the right part, anything I really want. My looks are against me. They’re too specific.”

— Marilyn Monroe

252. “People respect you because they feel you’ve survived hard times and endured, and although you’ve become famous, you haven’t become phony.”

— Marilyn Monroe

253. “Only the public can make a star. It’s the studios who try to make a system out of it.”

— Marilyn Monroe

254. “Next to my husband, and along with Marlon Brando, I think that Yves Montand is the most attractive man I’ve ever met.”

— Marilyn Monroe

255. “Gee, I never thought I had an effect on people until I was in Korea.”

— Marilyn Monroe

256. “Nights are not just for sleep.”

— Marilyn Monroe

257. “Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I’m invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who’ll play the piano after dinner, and I know you’re not really invited for yourself. You’re just an ornament.”

— Marilyn Monroe

258. “You can read about yourself but what’s important is how you feel about yourself.”

— Marilyn Monroe

259. “People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.”

— Marilyn Monroe

260. “I finally made up my mind I wanted to be an actress and I was not going to let my lack of confidence ruin my chances.”

— Marilyn Monroe

261. “All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me, and I’d worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them: ‘Don’t hide these things from me. I’d rather you ask me these things straight out, and I’ll answer all your questions.’”

— Marilyn Monroe

262. “Creativity starts with humanity when were being human we feel – joys, sadness, when we’re sick, when we’re nervous.”

— Marilyn Monroe

263. “I know I will never be happy, but I know I can be gay!”

— Marilyn Monroe

264. “Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.”

— Marilyn Monroe

265. “Acting isn’t something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you’re going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.”

— Marilyn Monroe

266. “Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.”

— Marilyn Monroe

267. “Husbands are chiefly good as lovers when they are betraying their wives.”

— Marilyn Monroe

268. “Men are always ready to respect anything that bores them.”

— Marilyn Monroe

269. “The worst thing that happens to people when they dress up and go to a party is that they leave their real selves at home.”

— Marilyn Monroe

270. “There was my name up in lights. I said, ‘God, somebody’s made a mistake.’ But there it was, in lights. And I sat there and said, ‘Remember, you’re not a star.’ Yet there it was up in lights.”

— Marilyn Monroe

271. “In Hollywood a girl’s virtue is much less important than her hairdo.”

— Marilyn Monroe

272. “Frankly, I’ve never considered my own figure so exceptional; until quite recently, I seldom gave it any thought at all.”

— Marilyn Monroe

273. “Well, whatever I am, I am the blonde!”

— Marilyn Monroe

274. “When you’re a failure in Hollywood, that’s like starving to death outside a banquet hall, with smells of filet mignon driving you crazy.”

— Marilyn Monroe

275. “I’ve fallen in love with Brooklyn. I’m going to buy a little house in Brooklyn and live there. I’ll go to the coast only when I have to make a picture.”

— Marilyn Monroe

276. “My illusions didn’t have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve!”

— Marilyn Monroe

277. “Someone said to me, ‘If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?’ My answer was then and still is, ‘If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong.’”

— Marilyn Monroe

278. “Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.”

— Marilyn Monroe

279. “I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle.”

— Marilyn Monroe

280. “A man has a tendency to accept you the way you are, while most women immediately start to pick flaws and want to change you.”

— Marilyn Monroe

281. “I didn’t mind being thought of as dumb. I knew I wasn’t.”

— Marilyn Monroe

282. “If marriage were only bed, we could have made it.”

— Marilyn Monroe

283. “It stirs up envy, fame does. People feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you – and it won’t hurt your feelings – like it’s happening to your clothing.”

— Marilyn Monroe

284. “An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.”

— Marilyn Monroe

285. “My public is growing up just as I am. After all, I’m not 19 anymore and if I stick with the sex bit, who will be paying to see me when I’m 50?”

— Marilyn Monroe

286. “As long as I can remember, I’ve always loved people.”

— Marilyn Monroe

287. “I want the world to see my body.”

— Marilyn Monroe

288. “I have been told my eating habits are absolutely bizarre. But I don’t think so.”

— Marilyn Monroe

289. “It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment.”

— Marilyn Monroe

290. “President Kennedy is very democratic and very penetrating.”

— Marilyn Monroe

291. “I’m one of the world’s most self-conscious people. I really have to struggle.”

— Marilyn Monroe

292. “There are many times when a woman will ask another girl friend how she likes her new hat. She will reply, ‘Fine,’ but slap her hand to her forehead the minute the girl leaves to yipe, ‘What a horror!’”

— Marilyn Monroe

293. “Nothing’s ever easy as long as you go on living.”

— Marilyn Monroe

294. “In leaving Hollywood and coming to New York, I feel I can be more myself. After all, if I can’t be myself, what’s the good of being anything at all?”

— Marilyn Monroe

295. “The truth can only be recalled, never invented.”

— Marilyn Monroe

296. “Acting became more than a profession to me. It became a sort of religion.”

— Marilyn Monroe

297. “An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?”

— Marilyn Monroe

298. “I doubt if any doctor could recommend a more nourishing breakfast for a working girl in a hurry.”

— Marilyn Monroe

299. “I’ve never liked the name Marilyn. I’ve often wished that I had held out that day for Jean Monroe. But I guess it’s too late to do anything about it now.”

— Marilyn Monroe

300. “We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.”

— Marilyn Monroe