Sidney Poitier Quotes

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.

There is a sense of self, of character, and of personal self-worth and kindness and hopefulness and embrace that is characteristic of such people, educated and noneducated alike.

You don’t have to become something you’re not to be better than you were.

Even if you are someone used to wearing armor, guarded and afraid, I think love is such a strong force it would find a way through your protective guard. It will get to your heart, and you can’t put any fences around that. As much as you might try, you simply can’t. You’re going to have other forces that will be operative at the same time if it is right for you to fall in love with this activity or individual or cause or process.

I am what I have become

behind each word is a meaning. Some words are friendly; some are not. Some will cause you pain. Some will make you cry. Some will protect you. Some will deceive you. Still, words and their meaning can be indispensable in preparing you for the battles you must win in order to survive.

Now, I don’t think we are killing people because we’re any worse than anybody else or any better. I think that what we are doing is showing the darker side of what human beings have always been: we have a capacity for love, a capacity for kindness, a capacity for passion, and we have an equal capacity for their opposites. Love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, but love and hate have their opposites, and we have now a huge dilemma: we have the world’s number-one spot, we are the strongest military in the world, and we have more people hating us than ever before. I

They have never found that area within themselves where they can be peaceful with who they are, what they are, and where they are.

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.

The older we get the less afraid we are.

Neither of us, however, was prepared for marriage, and neither of us had a way of knowing that. One may have seen successful marriages among family and friends, but there are so many independent energies intertwined in marital success that luck of the draw has to be a part of the whole equation. And we weren’t lucky.

A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better.

As a society we have grown to prefer the easy over the difficult, the quick over the slow, the cheap over the costly — and those choices are not often to the benefit of nature.

No one knows all that there is to know. (This despite Mark Twain’s observation that between him and Albert Einstein, they encompassed all human knowledge. As he put it, “Einstein knows all that there is to know, and I know the rest.”) The task is to learn as much as you can about as much as you can; the great disease of mankind is ignorance.

We're all somewhat courageous, and we're all considerably cowardly. We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.