Viola Davis Quotes

If I had one regret in life... it's that I was not more humble at an earlier age.

Wink at small faults; remember thou hast great ones.

At least once a year, I imagine that I am about to die. Looking back as truthfully as I can at my entire life, I give full attention to the things I wish hadn’t occurred. Recognizing these mistakes honestly but without self-recrimination, I try to rejoice in the innate wisdom that allows me to see so bravely, and I feel compassion for how I so frequently messed up. Then I can go forward. The future is wide open, and what I do with it is up to me.

If I had my life to live over again, I would ask that not a thing be changed, but that my eyes be opened wider.

'Looper' is about what your 55-year-old self would tell your 25-year-old self over a cup of coffee. It's about finding love in the third act of your life. It's about overcoming trauma and the idea of true sacrifice.

In looking back, I see nothing to regret and little to correct.

The older I get, the better I understand that every day is a gift.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.

Learn to see in another's calamity the ills which you should avoid.

What I've observed and what I've imagined - and definitely what I'm hoping - happens as you get older is that there's a mellowing, an acceptance that comes with time. I guess that I'll find out.

I was a very self-righteous 15-25 year old. Anyway, I wake up every morning and thank God I'm not a kid anymore.

Turning 60 had an impact on my heart and soul, I must say, because you're dealing with time: past, present, and future. You suddenly realize you've come down the road quite a ways.

You have to treat people gently because we're all in a process. What might seem like a good idea to somebody at 21 is probably not going to seem like a good idea at 50, but you don't know that until you get there.

I think that as you grow up, as you get older, we can't get bitter, we can't get jaded.

I don't feel like a very nostalgic person. I think about the past much more clinically. When I look back and wonder, 'Why was I doing that? Was it a waste of time?' I don't beat myself up. Instead, I say, 'I'm so glad I did that, because now I really know what matters to me.'

I'm going to be 75 in May. How can I have lived this long and not know anything?

You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for others - that you cleanse yourself of the sin of self-righteousness.

I'm older, and I wish that a lot of things that I did in my life, I didn't do, but I'm able to talk about it.

There are a few things that I regret, but nothing that I need to forget.

It's a good thing I learned some humility and perspective as I got older.

I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought. Giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I’m capable of. I believe they know everything that I do and think, and they still love me, and I’ve concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me.

You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

I've learned to take things a little more easily, to be a little more forgiving of myself.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

One wouldn't want to have the same dilemmas at 50 as one had at 15. And indeed I don't. I have a very different take on life.