Top 100 Viola Davis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “They say the two most important days in a persons life were the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.”

— Viola Davis

2. “You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny.”

— Viola Davis

3. “When your passion and drive are bigger than your fears, you just dive.”

— Viola Davis

4. “Anything can be achieved with a good, healthy dose of courage.”

— Viola Davis

5. “When you pray, God puts people in your life to lead you when you cannot lead yourself.”

— Viola Davis

6. “You can’t be hesitant about who you are.”

— Viola Davis

7. “They say, ‘To serve is to love,’ and I think to serve is to heal, too.”

— Viola Davis

8. “I had several teachers who inspired me, in both the public school system and the Upward Bound program. I needed several, because I lived in such abject poverty and dysfunction. And they’re still in my life today, because I consider them to be friends, actually.”

— Viola Davis

9. “I don’t have any time to stay up all night worrying about what someone who doesn’t love me has to say about me.”

— Viola Davis

10. “All you really need to do is shift people just a tiny bit for change to happen. It doesn’t have to be huge and humongous.”

— Viola Davis

11. “Do not live someone else’s life and someone else’s idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that’s inside of you.”

— Viola Davis

12. “Sometimes you see how humanity can rise above any kind of cultural ills and hate that a person’s capacity to love and communicate and forgive can be bigger than anything else.”

— Viola Davis

13. “I don’t want anyone putting any limits on me.”

— Viola Davis

14. “In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful, white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can’t seem to get there no how. I can’t seem to get over that line.”

— Viola Davis

15. “Tyler Perry’s ‘Madea Goes to Jail!’ Which, I have to tell you, of everything that I’ve ever done in my career, that’s the only thing that’s perked up the ears of my nieces and nephews. That is it, that’s done it for them. That made me a bona fide star in their eyes!”

— Viola Davis

16. “Let me tell you something: The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.”

— Viola Davis

17. “When you’re really passionate, you’re going to grab hold of every rope you see, and wrap them around your arms and legs to claw your way out. And that’s the way I’ve felt in my life.”

— Viola Davis

18. “I would love to be remembered as a person who used her life to inspire others in any way, shape or form.”

— Viola Davis

19. “Motherhood is 50 million heartbreaking moments, and 100 million joyous ones.”

— Viola Davis

20. “Ordinary people who are just kind of just going about their lives are transformed into heroes because they have the courage to put their voices out there. I think that’s a powerful message in this time of political strife.”

— Viola Davis

21. “And that’s what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves – parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it’s pretty spectacular.”

— Viola Davis

22. “At the end of the day, nobody can tell you how to tackle failure or how to handle change. The world is very good at encouraging you to go along with the status quo and at basking in your successes.”

— Viola Davis

23. “No matter what, people don’t think of me for glamorous parts. I’ll go to an audition or a meeting in a pretty dress, and they still think of me as depressed or embattled. Hopefully, that will change.”

— Viola Davis

24. “I can be busy for three years and you may not even know what I’m busy doing because you only see me in a few scenes here or there, but I’ve been working my tail off because there’s just not a lot.”

— Viola Davis

25. “The world is very good at encouraging you to go along with the status quo and at basking in your successes. But when you hit a wall in your personal life, and you screw up, people don’t give you a chance to navigate your way through it and tap into what’s extraordinary about you.”

— Viola Davis

26. “Creativity only resonates if you infuse real life into the work.”

— Viola Davis

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27. “You don’t get the pay-off when you’re playing a quiet character, so sometimes you want to just throw out all your work and say, “Okay, let me do something really funny or gimmicky, just so that I can get some attention in this scene.””

— Viola Davis

28. “I guess they say, “Necessity is the mother of invention” because you have two stark choices when you find yourself in a really desperate situation. You can either fold and cave-in to it or you can become really passionate about getting out of it.”

— Viola Davis

29. “We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.”

— Viola Davis

30. “I think that you always want to gravitate towards people who absolutely are great at what they do and go for authenticity.”

— Viola Davis

31. “I want my work to reflect my level of gifts and talent.”

— Viola Davis

32. “Relationships change us and make us grow.”

— Viola Davis

33. “My biggest discovery was that you can literally re-create your life. You can redefine it. You don’t have to live in the past. I found that not only did I have fight in me, I had love.”

— Viola Davis

34. “Sometimes you take a job for the money, sometimes you take it for the location, sometimes you take it for the script; there are just a number of reasons, and ultimately what you see is the whole landscape of it. But I can tell you from behind the scenes – that’s what it is, as an actor.”

— Viola Davis

35. “Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise.”

— Viola Davis

36. “Luck is an elusive monster who chooses when to come out of its cave to strike and who will be its recipient. It’s a business of deprivation.”

— Viola Davis

37. “May you live long enough to know why you were born.”

— Viola Davis

38. “And I sit in my jacuzzi with my script.”

— Viola Davis

39. “As an artist, you’ve got to see the mess. That’s what we do. We get a human being, and it’s like putting together a puzzle. And the puzzle has got to be a mixture, a multifaceted mixture of human emotions, and not all of it is going to be pretty.”

— Viola Davis

40. “If the opportunity is not out there for you to play it, then you don’t see it.”

— Viola Davis

41. “We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers.”

— Viola Davis

42. “Your internal dialogue has got to be different from what you say. And, you know, in film, hopefully that registers and speaks volumes. It’s always the unspoken word and what’s happening behind someone’s eyes that makes it so rich.”

— Viola Davis

43. “It would be great to bust through and make history. But what’s more important is the opportunity to continue to get roles that are complicated and wonderful, to be a part of the narrative and to get to do what our counterparts are able to do. It doesn’t just stop at holding an award.”

— Viola Davis

44. “I’ve always just simply seen myself as an actor. And I believe that it serves me well to just think in terms of my craft. If hypothetically, I saw myself only as a sex symbol, or as some other limited stereotype, I think I would feel like a complete failure.”

— Viola Davis

45. “It’s always hard to be private in public, which is what acting is because you have to do thing really emotionally naked.”

— Viola Davis

46. “It’s harder to work with people who are not as dedicated to their craft. It also leaves you a better actor when you finish the project, since you always feel like you’ve learned something.”

— Viola Davis

47. “I love Wal-Mart. You can put that down. I love Wal-Mart. My husband and I hang out there.”

— Viola Davis

48. “I do believe that there are African Americans who have thick accents. My mom has a thick accent; my relatives have thick accents. But sometimes you have to adjust when you go into the world of film, TV, theatre, in order to make it accessible to people.”

— Viola Davis

49. “We know the road of lack of recognition, of people telling us that we can’t headline a movie because black women don’t translate overseas, that every time we try to break the glass ceiling, people say no, people push back. And it’s everything that people don’t see out there.”

— Viola Davis

50. “Cicely Tyson was my inspiration to become an actor.”

— Viola Davis