Sidney L. Poitier KBE is a Bahamian-American retired actor, film director, activist, and ambassador. In 1964, Poitier won the Academy Award for Best Actor becoming the first black male and Bahamian actor to win that award. He is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, and the oldest living and earliest surviving Best Actor Academy Award winner. From 1997 to 2007, he served as the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan. These Sidney Poitier quotes will motivate you.
Best Sidney Poitier Quotes
- “Living consciously involves being genuine; it involves listening and responding to others honestly and openly; it involves being in the moment.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “You don’t have to become something you’re not to be better than you were.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “When you walk with someone, something unspoken happens. Either you match their pace or they match yours.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I never had an occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was… a human being.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I set my star so high that I would constantly be in motion toward it.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “A person doesn’t have to change who he is to become better.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I am the me I choose to be.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “Of all my father’s teachings, the most enduring was the one about the true measure of a man. That true measure was how well he provided for his children, and it stuck with me as if it were etched in my brain.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“I do know that I’m responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “You don’t have to become something that you aren’t to become better than you are.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “We’re all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.” ~ Sidney Poitier , Sidney Poitier quotes on life
- “Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren’t just what we’re taught. It’s what we experience during those early years – a smile here, a jarring sound there – that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I’ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. There is a certain anger: it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal rage–self destructive, destroy the world rage–and its flame burns because the world is so unjust. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“True ‘joy’ is the difference between just amusing ourselves to death and creating ‘meaningful’ pleasure.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I always wanted to be someone better the next day than I was the day before.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “Okay listen, you think I’m so inconsequential? Then try this on for size. All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value – to you I say, I’m not talking about being AS GOOD as you. I hereby declare myself BETTER than you.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “So I had to be careful. I recognized the responsibility that, whether I liked it or not, I had to accept whatever the obligation was. That was to behave in a manner, to carry myself in such a professional way, as if there ever is a reflection, it’s a positive one.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “If I’m remembered for having done a few good things and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that’s plenty.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “A good deed here, a good deed there, a good thought here, a good comment there, all added up to my career in one way or another.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “Acting isn’t a game of “pretend.” It’s an exercise in being real.” ~ Sidney Poitier , Sidney Poitier quotes on acting
- “I have always been a learner because I knew nothing.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I decided in my life that I would do nothing that did not reflect positively on my father’s life.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“I think the way I want to think. I live the way I want to live.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “My mother was the most amazing person. She taught me to be kind to other women. She believed in family. She was with my father from the first day they met. All that I am, she taught me.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I defend myself by improving myself.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “As I entered this world, I would leave behind the nurturing of my family and my home, but in another sense I would take their protection with me. The lessons I had learned, the feelings of groundedness and belonging that have been woven into my character there, would be my companions on the journey.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“I wouldn’t change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “Every new fashion is a form of rebellion.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “So it’s been kind of a long road, but it was a good journey altogether.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I was a gift to my mother. She was a remarkable person. God or nature, or whatever those forces are, smiled on her, then passed me the best of her.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I couldn’t adjust to the racism in Florida. It was so blatant… I had never been so described as Florida described me.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“There is not racial or ethnic domination of hopelessness. It’s everywhere.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “If the image one holds of one’s self contains elements that don’t square with reality, one is best advised to let go of them, however difficult that may be.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “Marriage is no way of life for the weak, the selfish, or the insecure.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words – and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“The older we get the less afraid we are.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I’d seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I”ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “Racism is very painful. That’s life. It never ends.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “But perhaps more important, as someone wishing to make a comment or two about contemporary life and values, I don’t have to dig through libraries or travel to exotic lands to arrive at a view of our modern situation refracted through the lens of the preindustrial world, or the uncommercialized, unfranchised, perhaps unsanitized-and therefore supposedly more “authentic”-perspective ofthe Third World. Very simply, this is because that “other” world, as alien as if separated by centuries in time, is the one from which I came” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“I’ll always be chasing you… Glory.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I cannot be understood in three minutes.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I lived in a country where I couldn’t live where I wanted to live. I lived in a country where I couldn’t go where I wanted to eat. I lived in a country where I couldn’t get a job, except for those put aside for people of my colour or caste.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I would like to grow less afraid of dying. I am infinitely less afraid today than I was 15 or 25 years ago. I was most afraid of dying when I was 33, because I come from a Catholic family.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “We suffer pain, we hang tight to hope, we nurture expectations, we are plagued occasionally by fears, we are haunted by defeats and unrealized hopes . . . The hoplessness of which I speak is not limited.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“If you apologize because you are afraid, then you are a child not a man.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “My father was a certain kind of man – I saw how he treated my mother and his family and how he treated strangers. And I vowed I would never make a film that would not reflect properly on my father’s name.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I find myself, at this time in my life, no less challenged, no less plagued, no less intrigued by what I still don’t know.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists… in the loved one, perfection.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that’s my dad. And he was a very good man.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“Generally, I tend to despise human behavior rather than human creatures.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it – all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “But I always had the ability to say no. That’s how I called my own shots.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “As I’ve mentioned, a large part of my father’s legacy is the lesson he taught his sons. He brought us together and said, ‘The measure of a man is how well he provides for his children.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I learned to hear silence. That’s the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I’m going to quit writing.” ~ Sidney Poitier
- “I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else’s vision of me.” ~ Sidney Poitier
