No matter where you're from, your dreams are valid.
What I've learned from myself is that I don't have to be anybody else. Myself is good enough.
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.
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.
You fail, and then what? Life goes on. It's only when you risk failure that you discover things.
Every time I overcome an obstacle, it feels like success. Sometimes the biggest ones are in our head - the saboteurs that tell us we can't.
You have to allow for the impossible to be possible.
What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion: for yourself and for those around you.
I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.
Your value is in yourself; the other stuff will come and go.
I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it.
We don't get to pick the genes we want. There's room in this world for beauty to be diverse.
There is no shame in black beauty.
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.
When I was in the second grade, one of my teachers said, "Where are you going to find a husband? How are you going to find someone darker than you?" I was mortified. I remember seeing a commercial where a woman goes for an interview and doesn't get the job. Then she puts a cream on her face to lighten her skin, and she gets the job! This is the message: that dark skin is unacceptable. I definitely wasn't hearing this from my immediate family - my mother never said anything to that effect - but the voices from the television are usually much louder than the voices of your parents.
European standards of beauty are something that plague the entire world - the idea that darker skin is not beautiful, that light skin is the key to success and love. Africa is no exception.
I come from a loving, supportive family, and my mother taught me that there are more valuable ways to achieve beauty than just through your external features. She was focused on compassion and respect, and those are the things that ended up translating to me as beauty.
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 in that beauty.
I feel privileged that people are looking up to me and perhaps a dream will be born because of my presence.
To be human is to seek perfection, and find joy in never attaining it.
Part of being an artist is that you are always concerned you don't have what it takes. It keeps us honest.
I've worked hard to feel beautiful in my natural skin. Personally, I don't ever want to depend on makeup to feel beautiful.
With success comes more responsibility, a larger size of existence, which is uncomfortable.
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.
Everyone said, ‘Brace yourself, Lupita! Keep a granola bar in that clutch of yours!’ I didn’t really understand what they meant, and it was only once it was past that I realized that my body had been holding on by a thread to get through this very intense experience. Nothing can prepare you for awards season. The red carpet feels like a war zone, except you cannot fly or fight; you just have to stand there and take it.
