Viola Davis Quotes

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

They say the two most important days in a person's life were the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.

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

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

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

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.

You can't be hesitant about who you are.

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.

I just look at women sometimes and I just want to ask them, "Do you know how fabulous you are?"

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

There's not one woman in America who does not care about her hair, but we give it way too much value. We deprive ourselves of things, we use it to destroy each other, we'll look at a child and judge a mother and her sense of motherhood by the way the child's hair looks. I am not going to traumatize my child about her hair. I want her to love her hair.

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.

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.

Every artist, true artist, struggles with an overwhelming sense of feeling like you're not worthy.

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. 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.

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.

I’m a black woman who is from Central Falls, Rhode Island. I’m dark skinned. I’m quirky. I’m shy. I’m strong. I’m guarded. I’m weak at times. I’m sensual. I’m not overtly sexual. I am so many things in so many ways and I will never see myself on screen. And the reason I will never see myself up on screen is because that does not translate with being black.

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

Relationships change us and make us grow.

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

They say, 'To serve is to love,' and I think to serve is to heal, too.

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

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.

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.

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