Meryl Streep

The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.

I think you find your own way. You have your own rules. You have your own understanding of yourself, and that's what you're going to count on. In the end, it's what feels right to you. Not what your mother told you. Not what some actress told you. Not what anybody else told you but the still, small voice.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.

I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.

I have a theory that movies operate on the level of dreams, where you dream yourself.

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.

I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.

I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

It's amazing how easily people are led to fury and chaos. Unhappy people with guns are not going to make this country great.

Everything we say signifies; everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time.

There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.

Hillary Clinton has taken some fire over 40 years of her fight for families and children. How does she do it? That's what I want to know. Where does she get her grit and her grace? Where do any of our female firsts, our pathbreakers, where do they find that strength?

The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.

Grace, respect, reserve, and empathetic listening are qualities sorely missing from the public discourse now.

I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.

I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I__e become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me.

The quote above about patience is NOT MERYL STREEP's-- this quote is actually from the pen of Portuguese self-help author/life coach José Micard Teixeira. PLEASE REMOVE IT!!!!!