Shirley Maclaine Quotes

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.

We are not victims of the world we see, we are victims of the way we see the world.

Audrey was the kind of person who when she saw someone else suffering tried to take their pain on herself. She was a healer. She knew how to love. You didn't have to be in constant contact with her to feel you had a friend. We always picked up right where we left off.

The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.

I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I've written for myself, and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part.

It's useless to hold a person to anything he says wile he's in love, drunk, or running for office.

Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.

You think you have a handle on God, the Universe, and the Great White Light until you go home for Thanksgiving. In an hour, you realize how far you've got to go and who is the real turkey.

One of the most erogenous zones of a woman is her intelligence.

Release and resolve fear, and what you want flows freely.

I believe we have neglected to see that terrorism is just a convenient excuse for those in power to gently instruct us to go quietly into that good night of being compliant and unrevolutionary citizens who willingly become subjugated to authority.

New Age thinking asks that each person take responsibility for everything that happens in life because everything in life is connected.

Someday change will be accepted as life itself

I found that no matter what unpleasantness I found myself involved with, if I stopped and asked myself, “Why have I created this? What am I learning from this?” the circumstance became not a tragedy but an enlightening experience.

Pain was nothing but resistance; resistance to the God energy caused by fear. Without fear and resistance, death would simply be a transition to another dimension.

One drop of joy plus courage becomes passion, which enables you to take effective action without thought. One drop of joy plus discipline becomes empathy, the ability to know that your emotions are real and all those around you are real, which then restores your God-consciousness.

At last it dawned on me that the differences between us were not really simply because he was Russian and I American. Sure, we were having trouble with cultural differences. But it was our versions of evil that really differed--evil in relation to God and man, not evil in relation to sociology or socialism. Russians and Americans couldn't have been more diametrically opposed in relation to hope and the future. And the Bolshevik Revolution hadn't that much to do with it. But it was just too easy to say the Russian soul was imprinted with the need to suffer. Nor was it true that the American soul was imprinted with an adolescent naïveté causing enthusiasm and optimism to spring eternal.

Then there were times when Vassy compulsively yet touchingly would get very drunk and break down in great heaving sobs when we got home. No one could possibly understand what it meant to be a 'fucking Russian in America,' he sobbed. 'My fucking country, my beloved Russia,' he would cry. 'No one understands my country. You judge us, you condemn us, you believe we have swords in our teeth. You're so conditioned, so brainwashed, even more than we are. At least Russians know about America, not only bad things. And you here imagine Russia as a concentration camp! You don't like Commies! That's your problem. Now I hear Americans think 'Russian' is the same as evil, stupidity, idleness. That's dangerous! What about our culture, our music, our ingenuity, our patience, endurance--these are qualities, not drawbacks! Yes, we are fucking different, why not? Why should we be the same? Instead of trying to change each other, why don't we simply tolerate our differences and enjoy similarities?

Maybe it didn't really matter what we did to preserve ourselves. There was always some truck somewhere. The thing was not to let that stop you not to let it direct your life

Perhaps we should move backward with courage, so as to understand what we really came from and who we were.

It means moving forward with courage,” she answered.

Ultreya,

Technology has become the way Western man perceives progress. But technology itself is a reflection of how we see ourselves. If the negativity is in us, it will appear somewhere in our technology.

I thought of Jack Nicholson telling Shirley MacLaine that a stiff drink “might kill the bug you got up your ass.” I thought of John Riggins, the great, wild running back of the Redskins, telling Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at a White House dinner to “loosen up, Sandy baby.

The math teacher, for instance, was so absurdly pompous that I would burst out laughing the minute he walked into the room. Unfortunately, I couldn't stop. I became so disruptive that he made me wear a dunce cap and sit in the corner, facing the wall. That only made me laugh more. It seemed the more he punished me, the more I laughed. Soon I was dreading going to math class, because I knew I was going to start laughing and never stop. He would grow furious, and I would laugh even more. It was agony, but I couldn't help it!

People’s actions are always determined by the way they see themselves in the world.

Every single day is a lesson in the old adage that the transformation of the world we see begins with the transformation of how we see ourselves. Everything begins at home and the choices we make within the Self. I used to hear these words and privately feel that this was simple “selfishness” or even dangerously self-centered fantasy. No longer. To me, this concept has become a giant truth. “Know thyself”—and everything else follows.

each one of us has the responsibility to create the world in which we choose to live.

Desiring to be free within oneself is a serious step to take because with it comes complete responsibility for everything we do. Meditation is not an escape or an indulgence. It is an act of inner responsibility. It takes discipline, hard work, time, effort, and patience with self—which I personally find is the hardest patience to sustain.

social appropriateness” had deterred his growth and blunted his courage. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. I wanted to be myself regardless of what anybody thought.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence began working like real nuns, raising money for the sick at church bingos and organizing a charity dog show featuring Shirley MacLaine as emcee.

SHIRLEY MACLAINE: He said to me, “Murder can be fun.

I was asking God to save me when the point of being alive was to find the God within myself. That was the point to being alive..

Without the knowledge of God within us, we suffer.

Our reality is up to each of us, and how we chose to perceive it would either destroy or improve our lives.

But Honeybun,' I would counter, 'you can't have real love without respect.' 'That is not true in Russia. You either love or you respect. You can not do both.' 'How do you mean?' 'With love you have jealousy, possessiveness, and many other emotions and passions which make respect impossible. We know that in Russia, therefore we accept it.

I read many books on Russian artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians in an attempt to understand [Vassy, her partner]. I seemed to be concluding that the Russian himself was saying 'We are not to be understood.' It was maddeningly challenging to me. I didn't like not understanding...at least to my satisfaction. Half savage, half saint. That seemed to be the consensus of opinion among the Russians themselves. The communist government appeared to be irrelevant, merely a continuation in a different form of a system which basically denied the importance of the individual. Vassy had told me in the beginning that the Russian people had the government they needed and understood, and in many respects he even claimed they would want Joe Stalin back because he would, in effect, protect them from themselves.

A spiritually evolved person in a former lifetime could choose to have the experiences of spiritual blindness in this lifetime, just to act as a catalyst for someone like you who needed to be more articulate about what you had come to realize.

I am stubborn," he had said once, 'or how you call "obstinate," then you must hit me. Hit me hard. Russians need to be hit. We only understand to be hit. We need a big fist, I can tell you.