Top 180 Meryl Streep Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What makes you different or weird, that’s your strength.”

— Meryl Streep

Featured in: Believe in Yourself Quotes, Positive Quotes for Women, Identity Quotes, Self-Belief Quotes, Different Quotes

2. “True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.”

— Meryl Streep

3. “Guard your good mood.”

— Meryl Streep

Featured in: Happy Sunday Quotes, Happy Tuesday Quotes, Happy Saturday Quotes

4. “If you have a brain, you are obliged to use it.”

— Meryl Streep

5. “The minute you start caring about what other people think, is the minute you stop being yourself.”

— Meryl Streep

6. “The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.”

— Meryl Streep

7. “The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.”

— Meryl Streep

8. “You don’t have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you.”

— Meryl Streep

9. “I want to feel my life while I’m in it.”

— Meryl Streep

10. “It’s amazing what you can get if you quietly, clearly and authoritatively demand it.”

— Meryl Streep

11. “Empathy is at the heart of the actor’s art.”

— Meryl Streep

12. “Put blinders on to those things that conspire to hold you back, especially the ones in your own head.”

— Meryl Streep

13. “My advice: Don’t waste so much time worrying about your skin or your weight. Develop what you do, what you put your hands on in the world.”

— Meryl Streep

14. “I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.”

— Meryl Streep

15. “There are some days when I, myself, think I’m overrated.”

— Meryl Streep

16. “You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious, and when you’ve lost a lot of people, you realize that each day is a gift.”

— Meryl Streep

17. “I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me.”

— Meryl Streep

18. “The work itself is the reward, and if I choose challenging work, it’ll pay me back with interest. At least I’ll be interested, even if nobody else is.”

— Meryl Streep

19. “It’s so much easier to be happy. It’s so much easier to choose to love the things that you have, instead of always yearning for what you’re missing, or what it is that you’re imagining you’re missing. It is so much more peaceful.”

— Meryl Streep

20. “I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities.”

— Meryl Streep

21. “Sometimes you look out the window and you look at all the windows, and think inside very single one of them is somebody with some huge, weird, terrible problem, some great jokes.”

— Meryl Streep

22. “The work will stand, no matter what.”

— Meryl Streep

23. “You can’t get spoiled if you do your own ironing.”

— Meryl Streep

24. “Being an actor lets me be a million different things.”

— Meryl Streep

Featured in: Quotes About Actors

25. “If you make the tough decisions, people will hate you today. But they will thank you for generations.”

— Meryl Streep

26. “I’ve thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it’s the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain.”

— Meryl Streep

27. “We need art as much as we need good works. You need it like food. You need it for inspiration, to keep going on the days that you’re low. We need each other in that way.”

— Meryl Streep

28. “Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.”

— Meryl Streep

29. “Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow.”

— Meryl Streep

30. “People want what they want. Sometimes you just have to walk in defiance of it and just be yourself.”

— Meryl Streep

31. “Listening is everything. Listening is the whole deal. That’s what I think. And I mean that in terms of before you work, after you work, in between work, with your children, with your husband, with your friends, with your mother, with your father. It’s everything. And it’s where you learn everything.”

— Meryl Streep

32. “You can be afraid in a press conference, nervous, sweaty, but you can’t be afraid when you do your work because it doesn’t work that way.”

— Meryl Streep

33. “The greatest gift given to man by God – is the ability to empathize.”

— Meryl Streep

34. “Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.”

— Meryl Streep

35. “When criticism comes your way as an actor they are not criticizing your writing or your painting or your piece, they are criticizing you! It is hard to put that away in a place where you are not hurt.”

— Meryl Streep

36. “We are the choices we have made.”

— Meryl Streep

37. “Acting is my way of investigating human nature and having fun at the same time.”

— Meryl Streep

38. “The idea that people do very bad things for sometimes very good reasons, feels reasons.”

— Meryl Streep

39. “I’m curious about other people. That’s the essence of my acting. I’m interested in what it would be like to be you.”

— Meryl Streep

40. “I once read that in any good marriage, one partner is the gardener and the other is the garden. We take it in turns to be either.”

— Meryl Streep

41. “You have to embrace getting older.”

— Meryl Streep

42. “Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too.”

— Meryl Streep

43. “You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but Earl Blackwell finally died, and I was on his blacklist every year for being the worst dressed person.”

— Meryl Streep

44. “Everyone tries to look a cookie-cutter kind of way, and actually the people who look different are the ones who get picked up.”

— Meryl Streep

45. “There’s no road map on how to raise a family: it’s always an enormous negotiation.”

— Meryl Streep

46. “The thing that you have to fight the most when you lose is you feel like the biggest failure in the world.”

— Meryl Streep

47. “I think your self emerges more clearly over time.”

— Meryl Streep

48. “That is the simple secret. Always take your heart to work.”

— Meryl Streep

49. “You just have to keep on doing what you do. It’s the lesson I get from my husband; he just says, Keep going. Start by starting.”

— Meryl Streep

50. “Most of the great practitioners of the art of acting know exactly what they’re doing; even in the best, most successful moments, when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing, they still, somewhere deep inside their body, know what they’re doing. There is a craft.”

— Meryl Streep